The MIH pays tribute to Swiss artists

Enamel painting appeared in the early seventeenth century and has frequently been likened to oil painting. Its role in the decoration of watches goes back more than two hundred years. “Working with a brush, the enameller uses vitrifiable colours composed of finely-ground mineral oxides, diluted with essential oil or turpentine, to paint veritable miniatures,” explains Catherine Cardinal, a lecturer at Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand (France) and for twelve years a facilitator at the Musée International d’Horlogerie (MIH) in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), in Splendeur de l’émail*. “(…) The first publications describing this technique date from the eighteenth century and they each emphasise the multiple difficulties which enamellers, then as now, encounter in the course of their work.”

The creation of an enamel miniature requires “patience, dexterity, discipline and skill at each of the invariable stages in the painter’s work,” wrote Louis-Elie Millenet in his Manuel pratique de l’émaillage sur métaux (1922). First there is the preparation of the gold or copper sheet to which the enamellist fixes the base layer of enamel, applied to both sides to prevent the metal from becoming warped in the kiln. The palette of colours is then chosen, and a line drawing of the subject traced onto the enamel base. The colours are applied in layers, each one fired in the kiln. The final stage, the one on which the entire piece hinges, is the mise sous fondant, a technique invented by Genevan enamellists in the eighteenth century whereby the miniature is covered with a colourless, protective glaze. This meticulous, painstaking craft is now at the centre of a temporary exhibition which the MIH is devoting to Louis Reguin (1872-1948), an enamel painter from La Chaux-de-Fonds. This master of miniatures has inspired the exhibition’s title, Monumental Miniatures**.

A giant of miniature painting

“His talent as an artist was quickly acknowledged, earning him orders from the major companies, including Movado in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and Weber in Geneva,” note Urs Staub and Thomas Walser-Wied in the exhibition catalogue. “Louis Reguin’s renown also won him a clientele of wealthy individuals, among them princes and monarchs. He worked for Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and for an Ethiopian Negus. Reguin’s enamels are masterpieces of miniature painting, capturing the personality and even private life of their owner. Veritable microcosms of lustrous colour in just a few square centimetres, revealing themselves only to whomever affords them the necessary attention, these tiny paintings convey with extreme precision a person’s physical and moral features, the poetry of genre paintings, the monumental force of imposing mountain landscapes or the tenderness of floral bouquets.”

“We staged an exhibition on enamels about ten years ago,” Jean-Michel Piguet, deputy curator at the MIH, comments. “This time though the idea was put to us by a private collector who owns 445 paintings and enamels by Louis Reguin, who studied at the enamelling school in La Chaux-de-Fonds. In view of the collection’s outstanding artistic quality, we agreed to this request and decided to show the enamels at the MIH and the paintings at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.” So that visitors to the MIH can appreciate the full subtlety of these miniatures, they are presented in showcases with binoculars linked to a screen to bring out the finesse, detail and depth of colour of these unique enamel masterpieces.

An epic journey through the history of timekeeping

The MIH is devoting a second temporary exhibition*** to the Swiss artist Hans Erni. It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the frescoes which he painted for the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, and which are now part of the Museum’s collection. The exhibition illustrates the technology of this era from two angles. The first is Favag’s universal clock, described in the introduction to the exhibition as “perhaps not the most visible but certainly the best understood part of the precision timepiece shown in the Watch section of the Swiss pavilion.” The reference timepiece in Brussels was an ammoniac molecular oscillator. Time was kept by a quartz clock and diffused via a vast network of secondary clocks, including the universal clock in the exhibition. This network was commanded by an extremely precise pendulum clock, synchronised by the quartz clock. The MIH is also presenting various watches, chronometers and clocks from 1958 alongside this universal clock. They are all shown under their brand name, a marked difference from Expo ’58 when all the Swiss timepieces on display were labelled with the Fair’s logo of an asymmetric five-pointed star.

The exhibition’s second focus is Hans Erni’s triptych, whose three parts are divided between the history of time measurement, the techniques of time measurement and the philosophy of time measurement. The artist painted these frescoes a tempora (mixing pigments with egg yolk) while the backgrounds are an example of one of Erni’s favourite techniques: newspaper is crumpled onto the wet paint then removed to create a dynamic imprint, before accentuating the subjects’ contours. Says the MIH, “eleven characters have stepped out of the frescoes to illustrate the exhibition,” with Ptolemy, Copernicus, Einstein, Newton, Galileo and Huygens, not forgetting such figures as Harrison, Breguet and Guillaume. They are each placed in context by symbolic and no less prestigious pieces.

*Splendeurs de l’émail – Montres et horloges du XVIe au XXe siècle, Catherine Cardinal, published by Institut l’Homme et le Temps, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1999.
**Louis Reguin, Miniatures Monumentales, exhibition from May 17th to October 19th 2008 at the Musée International d’Horlogerie and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds.
***Hans Erni, La Conquête du Temps, exhibition from April 18th to September 21st 2008 at the Musée International d’Horlogerie, La Chaux-de-Fonds.