This is a specoal edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. I’m back with another edition of Around the Clock, Box + Papers' fun-loving and free-flowing Friday counterpart. 12 o’clock: “The golden stain of time” is a phrase I’ve been bouncing around in my head like a superball. I came across it while reading about the epic new Bayeux Tapestry exhibit on display at the British Museum.
The tapestry is 900 years old, 220 feet long, and composed of panels that illustrate the 1066 invasion of England by William the Conqueror in full gory detail, with heads tumbling away from bodies and arrows burrowing into eyes. The fact that Christopher Nolan hasn’t already cast Robert Pattinson as the lead in an IMAX blockbuster based on the tapestry makes me question if he’s lost a step. 1 o’clock: Being me (a nerd), the part that most frissoned my cortex was the way that the tapestry, by virtue of its ancientness, captures how attitudes toward conservation have looped and changed throughout history. In the 19th century, when conservationism emerged as a profession, many early adherents thought it was their solemn duty to make old art look new again.
They took this idea so far that many experts believe there are elements in the tapestry, like the aforementioned arrow, that were added whole cloth (pun intended) by these overzealous conservationists. The English critic John Ruskin was part of a minority who believed artworks should be left to age naturally and acquire the golden stain of time. To become…tropical, if you catch my drift. 2 o’clock: So, what does any of this have to do with watches?
The golden stain of time has become one of the most bankable qualities in the world of vintage watches. For the uninitiated: “tropical dials” refer to the faces of certain vintage timepieces, whose once-black dials have taken on a soft, brown hue through a combination of age, oxidation, and/or sun exposure. These watches now command a premium from patina-obsessed collectors, to the point that auction houses and dealers now have to be careful to avoid pieces that have been artificially aged to boost their value.
Much like the conservationists of Ruskin’s era, however, it took some time for watch enthusiasts to fully come around on the golden stain of these timepieces. 3 o’clock: “I remember a long time ago, in the late 2000s, there was only a small subset of people who enjoyed these,” says Jacek Kozubek, the dealer behind the aptly named Tropical Watch. Eventually, people started showing them to me before putting them out in their booths, because they knew I really liked tropical dials.” 4 o’clock: The term “tropical watch” wasn’t used in an auction listing until 2007, Tony Traina reported in an issue of Unpolished this summer. The watch, a muddy version of the Rolex Submariner ref. 1680, sold for 50,000 Swiss francs, double its estimated sale price.
The descriptor originally surfaced on watch forums a couple of years prior to that IRL debut. William Massena, a former TimeZone moderator who now heads up the brand Massena Lab, told Traina that he and his fellow chatroom regulars thought these brown-dial beauties had been artificially modified at first. The abiding sentiment that these signs of age should be appreciated stood out to me, because that’s one way that a mass-produced good like a watch can inch closer to feeling like a true work of art.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
