The tartans are the only subjects in the current Rare Handcrafts group with no image in them at all. Where the rest of the selection carries birds, mountains and buildings, this dial carries a woven pattern, and abstraction changes what the work is being judged on. There is no likeness to assess and no scene to read. What remains is registration, the precision with which a repeating geometric pattern holds its intervals across a curved and reflective surface, and a single line out of alignment is visible immediately in a way that an imperfect feather is not. The case is white gold and the reference belongs to the current catalogue year, leaving the collection in 2027. Tartan also carries a specific weight that a geometric pattern invented for the purpose would not, since every setting of it refers to woven cloth rather than to ornament, so the dial reads as a material rather than as a decoration.
The case measures 34.5 by 39.5 mm and 6.58 mm thick. The dial is built in two stages rather than one. First the metal is engine turned by hand, cut on a rose engine so that the surface carries a machined pattern of fine grooves, and this is where the geometry of the tartan is established. Translucent enamel is then fired over the engraving, so that light passes through the coloured layer, strikes the turned metal beneath and returns through the enamel a second time. That double passage is what gives the finished dial its depth and its movement under changing light, and it is also why the technique is unforgiving. A transparent layer conceals nothing. Any hesitation in the engine turning, any irregularity in the depth of a cut, is not merely still visible after enamelling but magnified by it, so the two operations have to be executed to the same standard or the dial fails on the weaker one. White gold cheveu-style hands run across the surface, drawn thread-fine, and the case back is solid. The rose engine itself is a nineteenth-century machine operated entirely by hand, with the cutting tool held steady while the workpiece is moved against it through a system of cams. Nothing in the process is automated, and the regularity visible in the finished surface is the operator achievement rather than the machine.
Hours and minutes from an ultra-thin movement, with no seconds hand, no date and no aperture. On a geometric dial the argument for that specification is stronger than on a pictorial one rather than weaker. A repeating pattern makes any interruption conspicuous, because the eye completes the grid automatically and a window cut into it reads as damage rather than as a feature. A pictorial dial can sometimes absorb an aperture in a passage of sky. A tartan cannot absorb anything. The two hands that do cross the dial are the only interruption permitted and they are kept as narrow as they can be manufactured for exactly that reason. The ultra-thin movement holds the case at 6.58 mm behind a dial thicker than a conventional one and accepts a closed back as the cost. Across every reference in this group the mechanical content is arranged to stay out of the way of the dial, and on an abstract subject that intention is at its most visible.
Two tartans appear in the current group, this blue one on white gold and a beige counterpart on rose gold, and together they represent the abstract wing of a selection that is otherwise entirely representational. That makes them the outliers, and outliers in this programme tend to be either the first pieces a collector rejects or the ones they end up buying. Around them the same case carries four birds, three volcanoes and three architectural subjects, with a single reference, the northern pintail, executed in wood marquetry rather than enamel. This blue tartan and its beige counterpart are also the only two references in the group where hand guilloche is the foundation of the dial rather than an element within it. White gold appears on eight references in the current selection, more than the other two metals combined, and the Golden Ellipse case itself has held its proportions since 1968, which is why it hosts abstraction as comfortably as it hosts a landscape. Abstraction also changes how the group ages as a set. A scenic dial is tied to the year its subject was chosen, while a pattern is not, and the tartans are the two references in the current selection least likely to look dated against whatever replaces them in 2027.
This reference suits a collector who wants an example of the Manufacture decorative work without wanting a picture on the wrist. That is a real constituency and a persistent one, because a scenic dial commits the wearer to a subject every time the watch is worn while a geometric one does not, and there are buyers who admire the peacocks and the volcanoes without ever wanting to wear one. Blue on white gold is also the more graphic of the two tartans, reading as pattern rather than as cloth, which makes it the version that sits closest to a conventional watch dial and the easier of the pair to wear without comment. The terms are the same as across the programme. One catalogue year, an exit in 2027, no repetition, and a population fixed by the calendar. What is being bought here is the work of an engine turner and an enameller together, which is a narrower combination of skills than the scenic references require and a rarer one to see executed at this level. There is a further practical argument for a dial of this kind. A repeating pattern absorbs the small marks of ordinary wear far better than a scene does, because there is no single focal point for the eye to keep returning to, which matters on a watch a collector actually intends to put on rather than store.
