Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso 1935

Dealer description — Analog/Shift

Some vintage watches come with boxes and papers. Occasionally, one comes with a life story. This extraordinary LeCoultre Reverso, dating to circa 1935, comes from the first few years of one of the most important wristwatch designs of the 20th century. The Reverso had been patented only in 1931, famously conceived as a solution for British officers in India who needed a watch capable of surviving the rigors of polo. Its ingenious answer was a rectangular case that could slide from its cradle, rotate, and turn its metal back outward to protect the crystal. What began as a piece of sporting ingenuity became an Art Deco icon. This example captures the design in beautifully pure early form. Its rectangular case features the signature horizontal gadroons above and below the dial, while the wonderfully aged silvered dial has developed a warm patina across more than 90 years. Applied baton indexes, slender hands, a geometric minute track, and a distinctive rectangular small-seconds display at 6 o’clock create a design that feels almost architectural. The dial is signed simply LeCoultre, appropriate for a watch produced before the Jaeger and LeCoultre names were formally united as Jaeger-LeCoultre in 1937. But flip this Reverso over, and the story becomes personal. The reverse is engraved with the initials “AK,” and unusually, we know something about the person behind them. Accompanying the watch are its original British bill of sale from the Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company, a period photograph of the original owner, and a written family provenance tracing the watch back to Archibald Kelso. According to the accompanying history, the watch was a wedding gift from Lilian Simpson, his future wife. Simpson had worked as a ladies’ companion to Lady Bluckstein of the J. Lyons & Co. family. At the same time, Kelso was a Glasgow master confectioner and, reportedly, a baking tutor or supplier to Lyons. Suddenly those two engraved letters mean considerably more. The best vintage watches are objects that somehow survive after the people who originally owned them are gone. With an early Reverso, that history is especially poignant: the blank reverse of the case was conceived from the beginning as a place for initials, inscriptions, and personal expression. Here, the initials are still present, and remarkably, so is the story behind them.