French gold watch with raised enamelled gold Circa 1650

Gold enamel pocket watch by Nicolas Bernard
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An exquisite French pocket watch with a gold case ornamented with tiny flowers of raised, enamelled gold, likely made about 1650 or shortly afterwards.
Gilt metal, brass and blued steel verge escapement, steel balance wheel, a single foot balance cock, pierced and engraved cover for the ratchet regulator, brass plates and wheels, fusee with renewed gut line. Movement signed. Enamel dial with Roman hour chapter rings that border the edge of the round dial plate, deep red basse taille enamel centre and single hand. Exquisite gold case ornamented with tiny flowers of raised, enamelled gold.
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Diameter: 32 mm
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Signed: Nicolas Bernard Paris
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Very few watchcases survive with this variety of openwork designs of tour-de-force raised-and-dotted enamel. The dial, with black numerals on a pure white enamel chapter ring and a deep red basse taille enamel centre, is the product of a highly skilled artisan who was almost certainly working in Paris about the middle of the seventeenth century. Nicolas Bernard A Paris signed the pre balance spring movement of the watch. While there are several clockmakers named Bernard, or Benard, known to have been working in Paris in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there is no record of a Nicolas Bernard before 1636, when a man by that name was made a master clockmaker. By his death in 1670, he had become a merchant clockmaker and a burgher of Paris.
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At least six other watches signed by Nicolas Bernard Paris are also known. All are round; they have dials with hour chapter rings that border the edge of their round dial plates, and they have single hands. These are characteristics of French watches of the period beginning about 1640 and lasting until the adoption of the balance spring in 1675.