Important Danish gold pocket watch with jewels Circa 1850

Gold decorated full hunter watch
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An important and very rare Danish gold hunting cased pocket watch with jewels made for the jeweller Marrel Ainé, Paris, Bijoutier-Orfevre L’Impéreur et L’Impératrice, circa 1850.
18 Carat gold à goutte case with blood- and turkey stone mosaic, rose cut diamonds on both sides, the cuvette signed Marrel Ainé Paris and punched JJ for Jules Jürgensen. Very early Jules Jürgensen Ankerchronometer movement with key winding (comparable editions are pictured and described in the Knudsen book pages 223-230). White enamel dial with Roman numerals, sunk subsidiary dial for the constant seconds and Breguet hands.
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Diameter: 46 mm
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Weight: 114 g
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Signed: Marrel Ainé Paris (cuvette)

          Jules Jürgensen

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Bloodstone is a beautiful, mostly, dark green stone that features red or brown spots that form as a result of impurities in the iron oxide. These spots look like blood splatters, giving the stone its English name. The stone is also referred to as a heliotrope, and gets this name from the Greek words helio, meaning ‘sun’, and tropos, meaning ‘toward the sun’. It’s said that the colour is also reminiscent of heliotrope plants that face towards the sun. The solid green colour that encompasses the rest of the stone is brought in as a result of the amphibole or Chlorite minerals found in the green Chalcedony. Chalcedony is a cryptocrystalline form of silica that’s composed of fine intergrowths of moganite and quartz, the minerals that make up most agate stones too. Because of its varied composition, the green in bloodstone is not always evenly distributed and may have blue or yellow streaks in addition to green. It has been a popular gemstone for at least two thousand years.
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A real rarity, a very rare combination of one of the earliest very fine pocket watch movements by Jules Jürgensen with a rare and precious stone case. The company specialized in making jewellery, watches and other gold and silver objects with jewels and enamel.
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Brothers Jean-Pierre-Nazaire and Antoine-Benoît-Roch Marrel began working together as goldsmiths in 1833. It is assumed that Benoît created the objects, whereas it was Jean-Pierre who eventually signed them. During the industrial exhibition of 1839 in Paris, they presented their creations to the public for the first time and immediately won a gold medal. The visitors admired their extraordinary talent and loved the fact that the brothers brought back polychrome goldwork by using precious stones. The exhibition paved the way for the Marrel brothers who later received national and international commissions from various royal houses. Today some of their gold objects are held in a number of museums such as the Louvre in Paris.
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During the mid-19^th century (circa 1850), the highly celebrated Danish Swiss watchmaker Jules Jürgensen collaborated with the prestigious Parisian firm Marrel Ainé. But this was a commercial retail partnership rather than a co ownership of a single company.

The Collaboration: Jürgensen, who had established a sales presence in Paris to capture the high end English and American tourist market, provided ultra-precise chronometer movements. Marrel Ainé encased and detailed these movements in incredibly luxurious, gem studded pietra dura mosaic hunting cases (using materials like bloodstone, jasper, turquoise and rose cut diamonds) to retail to European royalty and upper classes.