Fine and important Swiss gold complicated lever watch Circa 1890

Gold repeater with perpetual calendar and moon phases by Louis Audemars
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An independent center-seconds, two-train, minute-repeating pocket watch important and complicated, large and heavy,18k gold, enamel and pearls decoration, keyless pocket watch with minute-repeating, two-train, independent dead seconds, perpetual calendar, moon phases and age. made for the Chinese market, circa 1890. Mechanical fully jewelled keyless lever movement, repeating on two steel hammers. Gold cuvette.
White enamel dial with Roman numerals, outer minute track, four subsidiary dials for month and leap year, day, date and moon phases with lunar calendar. The front panel decorated with a painted on enamel scene of two lovers with a bird in a rustic landscape against a blue guilloche enamel background, the back finely painted with a bouquet of flowers on blue enamel background, the band decorated with blue champlevé enamel to match the front and back panel. Repeating slide and chronograph button in the band. Case numbered and master mark “M-F” ”Meyland Freres”
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Diameter: 54 mm
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Signed: Smith and Son
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Smith & Son The leading London firm for high quality and complicated watches at the end of the 19th Century and during the opening decades of the 20th, was founded by Samuel Smith, jeweler and watchmaker, c. 1851. Watches were made for him by Nicole Nielsen. Alongside the wide range of civilian watches and clocks, Smith’s also made chronometers which performed well and made the firm a supplier to the Admiralty. Under the guidance of Herbert S.A. Smith, the firm developed into a large manufacturing company with its own research laboratories, the family succession being continued a further generation by Sir Alan Herbert Smith, with the company going on to make automobile and aircraft instruments alongside clocks and watches. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a period of general decline for British horology, a few British watchmakers created magnificent, ultra-complicated watches, as if to say to the world “look, we are still the best”. Some were made in collaboration with the best Swiss watch companies. These watchmakers were three from London: Charles Frodsham, Edward John Dent, and Samuel Smith, and one from Coventry: J. W. Player. La Smith & Son.