Image: The 'Marie Antoinette' watch 2 © The Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem
The watch will go on display in the UK for the first time in December as part of the museum’s next exhibition
The Science Museum is to put on display a watch last valued at $30m as part of its next exhibition.
On display in the UK for the first time, the Breguet’s No. 160 ‘Marie Antoinette’ will be part of the London museum’s exhibition ‘Versailles: Science and Splendour’.
In 1783 famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet was given an unlimited budget to craft a timepiece for Queen Marie Antoinette. The museum calls the resulting watch, completed decades later, the”most exquisite and sophisticated watch of its time”.
The watch remained in the possession of the Breguet company until it was sold in 1887, eventually finding its way into the collection of Sir David Lionel Salomons in the 1920s and then later displayed in the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem. After being stolen in 1983, it remained missing for more than two decades.
Its display in Versailles: Science and Splendour at the Science Museum, marks the first time the timepiece has travelled abroad since its return to the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in 2008.
Sir Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive of the Science Museum Group said the watch is “one of the most remarkable items we have ever secured”.
