Patek Philippe’s First Automaton Wristwatch Revives A Fable From 1958
The Patek Philippe Reference 5249R-001 turns Jean de La Fontaine’s The Fox And The Crow into horological masterpiece.
Almost 70 years ago, Patek Philippe created a pocket watch that told a story along with the time. Louis Cottier, the Genevan watchmaker best known for his world-time complications, had reinterpreted Jean de la Fontaine’s fable, The Crow and The Fox, in a timekeeping instrument that brought the two animals to life at the press of a button.
The watch was never sold and sat in the Patek Philippe Museum as one of its most prized exhibits. Until its second act this year, when the watch is reimagined as the Reference 5249R-001—Patek Philippe’s first automaton wristwatch in its modern history.
For those who are unfamiliar with the fable, The Crow and The Fox tells the story of a crow, flattered into singing by a fox who wants his cheese. The crow opens his beak and promptly loses its meal. The moral, as La Fontaine tells it, is that flattery ultimately serves the flatterer, not the flattered.
Patek Philippe’s previous President, Philippe Stern, who passed in June this year, had his own reading of the original watch that was recorded in a 2004 house publication. Stern reframed La Fontaine’s message as something closer to a mission statement. Patek Philippe’s aim, he wrote, was to offer clients permanent and intrinsic value rather than superficial praise.
Technical Imagination
In many ways, the Reference 5249R-001 is crytallising Stern’s vision. The watchmaking house’s first modern automaton wristwatch is a testament to Patek Philippe’s commitment to upholding exacting standards of technical imagination, mechanical innovation, and decorative craft.
The mechanism itself works like a stage cue. A single press of the pusher at two o’clock sets the sequence running: first the fox, indicating the hour with its paw for the early hours (or its muzzle from seven o’clock onward), then the crow, whose beak drops a cheese-tipped hand to mark the minutes against a graduated scale.
Once the time is displayed, the owner releases the pusher and both indicators reset to their original positions, ready for their next activation.
The evocative animation is made even more captivating by the dial’s sculptural components. Set against an 18k gold plate in Matara brown finish are 10 hand-engraved appliques across three shades of gold. The fox’s head and paws are not purely decorative. Because they carry the mechanism’s motion, the engraver working on them has to manage structural tolerance as much as ornament.
At their thinnest point, these appliques measure just 0.2mm. A patented clipping system allows four of them, fox, crow, and the foliage between them, to be fitted only after the minute hand itself has been placed, holding everything without adding to the dial’s overall thickness. Each dial demands roughly 150 hours of manual engraving.
Housed within the watch’s 43mm rose gold case is the Caliber 31-260 PS HMD AU, which delivers up to 48 hours of power reserve. As the displays are driven by snail-shaped cams, which means the crown must always be turned clockwise to set the time, Patek Philippe has built a safety feature within the movement that works rather like a one-way valve, permitting the correct motion while absorbing any accidental turn in the wrong direction.
With a piece as visual captivating as the Reference 5249R-001, it is tempting to allow the theatrical allure of the watch to overwhelm the message behind it. Just the fable reminds us, the fox does not flatter the crow with excess. Rather, the watch quite simply shows what time it is once it is asked. Everything else—however spectacular—is that the service of horological value.