The Girard-Perregaux 1966 Enamel Dial

06 November 2014 | Girard-Perregaux

Nowadays we talk about “enamel” everyday but when it comes to art and fine watchmaking it refers to something a bit different: it is an old process that is about fixing the enamel powder and ensuring its harmonious balance through heat during delicate firing stages, the outcome being a beauty that lasts forever.

For most of its history, it has been mainly used in early jewelry and decorative art, and later on in watches too. Girard-Perregaux has remembered us all enamel was really a nice way to decorate timepieces, by creating a new dial for its glorious Girard-Perregaux 1966.

The Girard-Perregaux 1966 Enamel Dial includes three super limited editions.The Girard-Perregaux 1966 ‘Pur Sang’ pays tribute to the wild beauty of the Arabian horse breed ‘pur sang’. For this collection Girard-Perregaux used vibrant hand-painted miniature, which means that the watchmakers enamelled the base plate in white and carefully decorated the surface of the dial with coloured enamels using a microscope. After every colour application the watchmakers fired the dial and topped it in the end with one last transparent layer of enamel.

The others two editions of the Girard-Perregaux 1966 Enamel Dial are the Girard-Perregaux 1966 ‘The Map’ and the Girard-Perregaux 1966 ‘The World’. Each of them is decorated with a map of the world, a great classic in the Haute Horlogerie tradition. For these collections Girard-Perregaux used the Cloisonné technique, so the five continents are delicately outlined by fine gold wires, into which the enamel is applied.

The watchmakers used a brush to lay the liquid enamel into the cavities. After that they fired the enameled plates into a furnace at 800°C and they removed, after the cooling, the enamel in excess. Last but not least they manually polished the dial with a diamond file, before a last firing called “Dorure" or gilding adds shine and reveals the enamel’s full splendour.

These Girard-Perregaux 1966 Enamel Dial Limited editions feature the elegant Girard-Perregaux 1966 gold round case 40mm wide equipped with in-house caliber GP03300-0060 and protected by a transparent sapphire case-back. Every Girard-Perregaux 1966 Enamel Dial is limited to 50 pieces and retails for 30.600€.