FOLLOWING THE GREAT MASTER’S PATH
The Manufacture’s Métiers RaresTM workshop continues its exploration of the great master’s Japanese ukiyo-e art with the unveiling of two new models inspired by a series of works produced in the 1930s.
If The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1831) is his most famous work, often represented and reinterpreted today in various formats, the entire pictorial output of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) meticulously portrays the beauty of 19th-century Japanese landscapes. It includes the series A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces produced between 1833 and 1834, to which belong two woodcuts, The Waterfall where Yoshitsune washed his horse at Yoshino in Yamato province and The Waterfall at Ono on the Kisokaidō Road, and which Jaeger-LeCoultre‘s Métiers RaresTM workshop has taken up to decorate the backs of two Reverso Tribute Enamel Hokusai watches. This pair, limited to 10 pieces per reference, join the models presented in 2021 and 2022, still inspired by the talent of the ukiyo-e artist.
To reproduce these paintings, which can be discovered by sliding the mobile part of the case, and to respect the blue, yellow, brown and green hues once used by the great Japanese master, the Manufacture’s craftsmen resorted to miniature enamel painting, applying around 14 layers, each fired at 800°C. As for the dial, which features faceted hour-markers and dauphine-style central hands, guilloché – a grain d’orge motif on one piece and a rhombus tapestry on the other – and translucent turquoise enamel were chosen to embody time. The hours and minutes are set by the hand-wound calibre 822, housed in a generously sized rectangular white gold case (45.6×27.4mm).
