When Caroline Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest sister, needed to tell the time, she bypassed the traditional watchmakers of the French court and turned directly to Abraham-Louis Breguet. The then Queen of Naples did not want a pocket watch, nor did she want a timepiece she would have to pin precariously to her heavy silk gowns. She wanted something far more avant-garde: functional jewellery designed explicitly for the wrist.
And with that royal decree, the world’s very first wristwatch was born—the historic precursor to Breguet’s iconic Reine de Naples collection. It comes as no surprise that this fundamental horological innovation was inspired by a woman. Caroline Murat was a self-professed devotee of Breguet’s mechanical genius, a passion she shared with Marie-Antoinette, for whom Breguet designed the legendary No. 160—a self-winding pocket watch so famously complex it spanned her entire reign.
Breguet’s ultimate masterpiece, the celebrated pocket watch No. 160—famously known as the “Marie-Antoinette.” Defined by its monumental mechanical complexity and a tormented history, the legendary timepiece has haunted collectors for nearly two centuries. After being stolen from a Jerusalem museum in 1983 and miraculously reappearing in 2007, its legacy lives on through the modern Marie-Antoinette replica, engineered entirely from original archival drawings. © Breguet
By the turn of the 19th century, Breguet’s timepieces were coveted across European high society. In England, Queen Victoria carried a custom Breguet travel clock on her royal tours, while the Duchess of Wellington’s quarter-repeating, neoclassical Style No. 3023 remains a masterwork of such artistic significance that it is preserved on display at The Louvre in Paris.
Abraham-Louis Breguet created the first wristwatch for Caroline Murat, sister of Napoleon and Queen of Naples © Breguet
The Master’s Eye
Yet, it is Caroline Murat’s original commission that continues to dictate modern watchmaking design. While the era favoured the heavy, ornamental flourishes of the Baroque style, Breguet worked as a visual minimalist, an engineer, and an astronomer. He introduced a restrained neoclassicism to the watch face that valued clarity over clutter.
According to Breguet CEO Lionel a Marca, this architectural restraint is what keeps the manufacture tethered to the human experience. The objective of modern watchmaking, a Marca notes, remains entirely unchanged from the founder’s original vision: to showcase the passage of time through a lens of absolute mechanical purity.
That astronomical lineage is clearly visible in the brand’s contemporary permanent collections, most notably the men’s perpetual Classique 7337 and its counterpart, the Classique Quantième Perpétuel 7327. Both models present the phases of the moon and hand-hammered starry nights across silvered gold dials, balancing a highly complex perpetual calendar module with an effortlessly readable layout.
The Breguet Classique 7337 features a hand-hammered moon phase indicator at 12 o’clock, translating ancient astronomy into a beautifully balanced, modern dial layout. © Breguet
A Modern Dialogue
This deep connection between mechanical rhythm and visual expression has long cemented Breguet’s presence within the global art community. Through its continuous, multi-year partnership with the global contemporary art fair Frieze, the house has consistently commissioned visionaries to interpret the elastic concept of time. This ongoing dialogue has manifested in diverse creative chapters—from artist Pablo Bronstein’s panoramic, industrial-revolution-inspired wallpapers to independent curator Somi Sim’s multi-city exhibition, Inhabiting Time, which challenged fairgoers to reflect on how humanity sensorially moves through life.
“The shape of the wristwatch has not changed since 1810, but the way we inhabit its history continues to evolve.”
Apropos, when Caroline Murat ordered that fateful timepiece in 1810, she received a watch whose dial shape was entirely unprecedented, attached to a strap fashioned from a finely wrought gold thread. Today, a Marca views his role as a facilitator of these iconic legends, translating archival heritage for the modern horological aficionado.
With the Reine de Naples, the manufacture honours the reality that it was a woman who originally defined the form of the wristwatch. Though an original model from the 1800s has yet to be recovered from private hands, the watch was meticulously relaunched using the extensive, beautifully preserved blueprints inside the Breguet museum archives in Paris and Zurich. Pristine, distinct, and mathematically balanced, it remains an artifact fit for a queen.
