French silver quarter repeating repoussé coach watch Circa 1740

Silver quarter repeating repoussé verge watch
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A large French repoussé silver, four-train coach watch with hour and quarter striking and repeating, date and alarm, circa 1740. The Rococo garden made by Le Roy in Friedberg. A very finely pierced, chased and engraved case with asymmetric scrollwork, a bezel decorated to match, the back with a scene of courting couples in a rococo garden, strike/silent lever in the dial plate, pendant with loose barrel and ring. White enamel dial with radial Roman numerals, outer minute track and Arabic five-minute numerals, date aperture above 6, inner enamel alarm disc with Arabic numerals and half and quarter hour markers and finely pierced gilt Louis XV hands.
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A gilt, full-plate movement, rectangular pillars with applied silver foliate frets, fusee with chain, foliate engraved spring barrels for the striking, repeating and alarm trains, polished steel hammers, verge escapement, three-arm brass balance, blued steel flat balance spring, very finely pierced, chased and engraved backplate furniture, polished steel endplate, calibrated silver regulator disc with radial Roman numerals, trip quarter repeating, striking and alarm on a bell in the back of the case, with independent trains for quarters and hours, a lever for silence/strike. Movement signed.
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Diameter: 115 mm
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Signed: Julien Le Roy  Paris 
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This watch, a very fine example of its type, shows many of the characteristics of those watches made in Friedberg for other European makers. Friedberg watchmakers specialized in the production of repeating and striking watches. From the beginning of the 18th century, they made watches and coach watches with quarter, half-quarter and even minute repeating mechanisms and sold them all over Europe. The cases, often of very high quality, were produced in Augsburg and the movements were made in the style of the country for which they were destined.
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Some of them were signed by their makers, some bear signatures of eminent French and English makers (perhaps at their request, when they were retailing them), and still others bear the signature of their makers, written backwards, together with the names of cities in which they were intended to be sold. Until the relatively recent discovery of a large number of ebauches, blancs and completed movements which had never been cased, and their study by serious specialists such as Sebastian Whitestone, these watches were wrongly attributed to unrecorded makers from different European countries.