In 1997, Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady was stolen from the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza. The painting was found undamaged in 2019. While numerous forgeries claiming to be the real deal turned up on the black market, the true painting lay hidden inside an ivy-covered crevice of the same museum's garden wall.
In 2013, experts at the Van Gogh Museum announced the painting "Sunset at Montmajour" was genuine although it had been declared a fake in 1991. The painting which was purchased by the Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad in 1908 had been stowed in an attic before this announcement was made, as Mustad himself had claimed the painting was clearly a forgery or incorrectly attributed to van Gogh.
A similar fate was shared by Gustave Courbet's painting "View of Lake Geneva". It was only declared a genuine work in 2017, and had been kept in the archives of a small French museum called Musée du Vieux Granville up until then due to the doubts over its authenticity.
Apart plot-lines like something out of a detective novel, what do these three masterpieces have in common? They've all ended up on covers of Jaeger-LeCoultre watches in the Reverso Tribute Enamel Hidden Treasures series. However, the appearance of paintings on this legendary watch with its reversible dial is nothing new in and of itself.
Jaeger-LeCoultre's Reverso has provided a canvas for miniature copies of a diverse range of works, such as "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, "Under the Wave off Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusai, "The Seasons" by Alphonse Mucha, "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt and "Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue" by Piet Mondrian. But it all started with a portrait of an Indian maharani, who debuted on the caseback of the 1936 Reverso.
The new trio of watches are also set apart by the different patterns on their dials: the watchmakers at Jaeger-LeCoultre selected a "herringbone" guilloché pattern for Courbet's painting, a "sunray" guilloché pattern for the van Gogh, and a "barleycorn" pattern for the miniature Klimt.
A white-gold case measuring 45.6 × 27.4 × 9.73 mm frames the paintings made using the Grand Feu enameling technique. The hour and minute hands are driven by the manually wound Jaeger-LeCoultre Caliber 822/2 movement, which has a 42-hour power reserve. All three models have been limited to a 10-piece series.