PATEK PHILIPPE MUSEUM
500 Years of Swiss Watch Design and History In Geneva
Watch-making
didn’t begin
in Switzerland - it came to the country with immigrants escaping persecution
at home. French Protestant Huguenots crossing
the border from Catholic France in the 1600s and later, others like a
young Polish cavalry officer, Count Antoine Norbert de Patek. After
departing his homeland in 1831 to escape Russian occupation, Patek
set up a
shop in Geneva selling fine watches. Seven years later he joined with
another Polish immigrant watchmaker Francois Czapek, to begin a watch-making
business Patek, Czapek & Co in 1839. The high-quality timepieces
they produced carried the distinctive flai
r
of their home country, but when Patek saw the revolutionary stem winding
system designed by Adrien
Philippe at the Paris industrial fair of 1844, Patek invited Philippe
to join the firm. After Czapek’s departed a year later, the company
became Patek Philippe. When England’s Queen Victoria discovered
their keyless watches at the London Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851,
the firm’s innovative horological pieces became the sought after
choice of crowned heads and heads of state, explorers and thinkers, making
Patek Philippe a world renowned premier Swiss maker of distinctive time
pieces for over 200 years (see Geneva Watch Tour).
In
2001, after a worldwide campaign to buy back their historic time pieces
where they might find them,
combined
with the company’s
extensive records and artifacts, Patek Philippe and company opened a
museum in a former jewelry workshop building in Geneva’s Plainpalais
district, creating a magical journey into their world of time, following
the history of their own designs and of watch-making, from Industrial
Age to Art Nouveau to Art Deco. The collection includes time-pieces worn
by the 
likes
of Richard Wagner, Queen Victoria, Rudyard Kipling and Albert Einstein.
On the ground floor is a collection of 400 antique watch-making
tools and a replica watch craftsmen’s workshop, observe a watch
craftsman restoring old watches, and view an introductory film in the
auditorium. Take the elevator to the top floor for the library and archive
of technical notebooks, original design sketches of Adrien Philippe,
time treatises by Christian Huygens and a rare collection of 700 books
and papers on the subject of time. On the second floor, wander through
the antique historical collection of magnificent time pieces from the
16th to the 19th centuries, 
the
first watches from the 1500’s to
the works of Huguenot watch makers escaping Catholic France to settle
in Switzerland. On the first floor you’ll find the collection of
Patek Philippe designs from 1839 to the present day. Enameled gold watches
or miniature portraits with art by Lalique, automated musical jewel cases
with singing mechanical birds coming to life, snuff-boxes of royal portraits,
Cloisonné domed table clocks, in an elegant display of almost secret
vault-like experience of the time pieces of rich royalty and complex
mechanisms of horological masterpieces.
Visiting the Patek Philippe Museum
The
Patek Philippe Museum is open to individual visitors and groups from
Tuesday to Friday between
2 and 5 PM, and Saturday 10 to 5. Adult
admission is 10 CHF, students 18-25 and seniors 7 CHF and children under
18 free. Saturdays at 2:30 a guided tour is offered for a journey through
watch-making history and the collection in English. Other languages are
available by appointment. © Bargain
Travel Europe
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Patek Museum
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SEE ALSO:
INTERNATIONAL WATCHMAKING MUSEUM – LA CHAUX-DE-FONDS
BEYER CLOCK AND WATCH URHEN MUSEUM ZURICH
ROSENGART PICASSO KLEE COLLECTION LUZERN
EINSTEIN HOUSE AND MUSEUM - BERN
CHÂTEAU DE COPPET - LAKE GENEVA
