A Unison of Dunes and The Dark: A New Arnold & Son’s creation

Arnold & Son has introduces  the Perpetual Moon 41.5 Platinum “Horse of the Dunes”, its latest horological creation, limited to eight pieces. This isn’t a mere watch, but a night scene rendered in metal, glass and pigment.

It is an engraved timepiece that wasn’t built merely to tell time, nor even to convey a story, but to offer a plot for one’s imagination. The dial begins its tale with a horse, roaming free across dunes beneath a great mother‑of‑pearl moon, the sand dissolving into the glistening dark of night.

The landscape belongs to no geography, a deliberate omission that hands the imagination its freedom. In this setting, Arnold & Son pays tribute to what it calls man’s most noble conquest — the horse — released into a world where nothing confines it, and where the watch becomes a canvas for reverie.

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The horse itself is an appliqué of 18-carat white gold, engraved entirely by hand. The craft declares itself with one, keen glimpse: the hooves, the flowing mane, the taut definition of muscle, the way shadow travels across its coat. Pale as moonlight, it commands the dial with the exact reigning tendency of a horse.

Behind it, the dunes are stroked to perfection by hand and enriched with luminescent material, their relief arid and shifting, as though the wind had only just finished shaping them. The sky is a disc of black aventurine glass, its metallic flecks scattering into a myriad of stars. Fine watchmaking, engraving and miniature painting share a single small stage, and none of them upstages the others.

The moonphase complication takes the form of two mother-of-pearl discs that are led into transition by one another, iridescent in daylight and luminescent in the dark, from the Super-LumiNova. All of it sits within a 41.5 mm platinum case.

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A Lunar Collaboration 

The artistry is matched by the mechanism. Powering the watch is the manual-winding calibre A&S1512, which follows the full lunar cycle of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds. So faithful is the reproduction that, provided the watch remains fully wound, 122 years would pass before it drifted a single day from the true astronomical cycle. On the caseback, a secondary moonphase indicator lets the wearer correct the display quickly and precisely.

Like every Arnold & Son movement, the A&S1512 is developed, manufactured, decorated, assembled, adjusted and cased up at the manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Two barrels and a regulating organ oscillating at 3 Hz provide a power reserve of 90 hours.

Only eight pieces will exist. Each is a fresh reading of themes long dear to the House, and a reminder of what artistic savoir-faire can offer the imagination when it is given a room to run.

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