Watches, Watches All Around, but Not a Timex to Be Found
In Two Sales, Bonhams Is Auctioning Off Rare Timepieces
By JAMES BARRONJUNE 12, 2014
Jonathan Snellenburg, the director for watches and clocks at Bonhams, the auction house on Madison Avenue. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
For this short history of time — not the cosmos-looking Stephen Hawking kind of time, but the kind kept by the ingenious and occasionally impractical watches that collectors fancy — Jonathan Snellenburg had the visual aids ready.
As visual aids go, they were shiny and expensive.
One was as bright as when it was the constant companion of a Pennsylvania Railroad employee and cost only a fraction of its current value, which Mr. Snellenburg estimated at $4,000 to $6,000.
Another visual aid was once a possession of a man whose other possessions included the Boston Red Sox when they won the World Series with Babe Ruth on the pitcher's mound. It was worth even more than the first one — $8,000 to $12,000, by Mr. Snellenburg's calculations.
Mr. Snellenburg will not have those visual aids after Thursday, assuming the morning and afternoon unfold as he expects them to.
Mr. Snellenburg is the director for watches and clocks at Bonhams, the auction house on Madison Avenue that has scheduled two sales of timepieces — in the morning, several dozen wristwatches and pocket watches, along with a Cartier clock from the estate of the movie actress Norma Shearer; in the afternoon, more than 300 pocket watches from a single collection.
Photo 
Clockwise from top left, a double enamel plated portrait fob watch, circa 1890; a watch owned by Joseph Lannin, a former owner of the Boston Red Sox; a pocket watch from the early 19th century; and a crystal plate pocket watch made by the Waltham Company in the late 19th century. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
The Bonhams sale follows watch sales at Sotheby's on Tuesday and Christie's on Wednesday that commanded even higher prices than those expected at Bonhams. At Sotheby's, a Patek Philippe wristwatch begun in 1903 and completed 20 years later sold for $2.965 million, well above the presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million.
Some of the watches in the Bonhams sale are older — much older. One of the oldest is a plain-looking silver pocket watch signed by Thomas Harland, who, Mr. Snellenburg said, is often mentioned as one of the earliest watchmakers in the American colonies.
Like luxury watchmakers of a later era, Harland believed in advertising, judging by what Mr. Snellenburg quoted in the auction catalog. Harland placed an ad in a Connecticut newspaper in 1773 saying that he "makes, in the neatest manner, And on the most improved principles, horizontal, repeating and plain watches in gold, silver, metal or covered cases."
But different artisans made the parts — there would have been a dial maker, an escapement maker and many others. "The question that everyone asks when you see a watch signed by Thomas Harland is, how much of it did he actually make himself and how much was made out of imported parts?" Mr. Snellenburg said. "Most watches that you see signed in colonial times in America are simply English imports."
He said the watch in the sale "does not appear to be totally English, so if he did not make part of it, he certainly repaired part of it." It has a brass escape wheel, gold hands and a presale price estimate of $7,000 to $9,000.
The Civil War brought "the first watches people could afford," he said, and mass production established the Waltham Watch Company as a predecessor of the Detroit automobile giants that marketed a model for every price point — good, better, best.
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A Patek Philippe platinum wristwatch with diamond numerals and a snake bracelet. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
"There was the Chevy case, the Buick case and the Maserati case," he said, but the differences were mainly cosmetic.
The parts inside the case — the wheels, springs and levers — were essentially the same from watch to watch. "But depending on the price point the watch might be sold at," he said, "they would finish that basic movement in a number of quality grades." He said that Waltham made more than 35 million watches between 1850, when it was founded, and 1957, when the original company went out of business.
And then there was the watch that belonged to Joseph J. Lannin, the owner of the Red Sox. The movement has 23 jewels — diamonds, of course, not the usual rubies — that are set in gold, Mr. Snellenburg said.
"This is the Maserati," Mr. Snellenburg said. "A watch to be given for special occasions."
Indeed, according to the inscription on the watch itself, it was given to Lannin at Fenway Park on Aug. 3, 1915, a few months before the team won the World Series.
It has a four-leaf clover on the 18-karat gold case, and each leaf has a diamond. But it was thinner than many earlier pocket watches, and that pointed to the future — perhaps not as far ahead as free agents, steroids and more World Series championships for the Red Sox, but certainly beyond Lannin's lifetime. (He died in 1928 at age 62.)
"That slim, smaller pocket watch evolved into the wristwatch," Mr. Snellenburg said, "but in the early part of the 20th century, certainly until the 1940s, wristwatches were not considered terribly masculine. Real men carried pocket watches."
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