Ref. 10234: one portrait, three sitters

Eighteen-karat rose gold, thirty-five millimetres, a champagne dial with applied gold markers and dauphine hands. At twelve o’clock, where the maker’s name would go, there is an engraved portrait. Above six there is a name in Arabic script. Nothing on the dial says Universal Genève. Analog:Shift has it in its First Look collection, unpriced. The dealer identifies the portrait as King Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who reigned from November 1953 until November 1964.

The Polerouter was launched to mark the polar flights Scandinavian Airlines began in 1954, Copenhagen direct to Los Angeles. Sotheby’s records that the first pieces went to the crew of the inaugural flight when it landed at LAX on 15 November 1954. The designer was Gérald Genta, then twenty-three. The earliest Polerouters ran on the calibre 138, a bumper automatic. This specimen carries the 138SS, seventeen jewels, with its seconds hand in the centre. Every ref. 10234 in the catalogues below is gold.

The portrait is where the record stops agreeing with itself. Sotheby’s offered a Universal Genève of the same description in 2014: pink gold, thirty-five millimetres, calibre 138SS, made in 1958, catalogued without a reference number. Its catalogue identified the engraving as Prince Faisal. The watch, it said, was one of fifty made on special order for the Saudi Minister of Finance, to celebrate Faisal’s new role as prime minister. It also explained the missing name. The dial was left unsigned out of respect, so that the image and the family name would not have to share space with the maker’s. The case back carried the signature instead, which is where Universal Genève went to wait.

Phillips offered a ref. 10234 1TL in Hong Kong, case number 1’856’690, also Faisal, also fifty pieces for the Minister of Finance, a story its catalogue attributes to scholars without naming any. It dated the watch circa 1958 and catalogued the movement as a manually wound calibre 285, in a case of thirty-five and a half millimetres. Roy and Sacha Davidoff list a ref. 10234-1TL in their archive with the same case number, 1856690, also on a gold Universal Genève mesh bracelet. Their description dates it circa 1956, catalogues the movement as the automatic calibre 138SS, measures the case at thirty-six millimetres and identifies the portrait as King Saud. It also calls the watch all original. That is one case number, two sitters, two years, two movements and half a millimetre. Loupe This offered a ref. B10234 of the same size and calibre, and catalogued the silhouette as Ibn Saud, the former King of Saudi Arabia. King Saud’s father, King Abdulaziz, died in 1953.

Sotheby’s estimated its example at five to seven thousand dollars. Loupe This estimated its own at four to six thousand. The Phillips watch, with the gold bracelet, sold for seventy-five thousand six hundred Hong Kong dollars against an estimate of sixty to eighty thousand. None of these figures settles anything about the face.

None of the four catalogues cites an archive extract. Two describe a commission of fifty watches. Phillips credits the account to scholars. Sotheby’s credits it to nobody. What can be said of this specimen is what it physically is: gold, thirty-five millimetres, a bumper automatic, a dial engraved by someone, for someone. By Sotheby’s account the maker’s name came off the front so that the portrait would not have to share the dial. The portrait has the dial to itself, and the record does not say whose it is.