Rupert Emmerson was head designer at Cartier London under Jean-Jacques Cartier during a period that produced two of the branch's most distinctive and collected watches: the Cartier Crash and the Cartier Pebble.
The Crash Commission
The brief Jean-Jacques gave Emmerson was to take the popular Oval (Baignoire Allongée) and adjust it to look as though it had been in a crash, "by pinching the ends at a point and putting a kink in the middle." Emmerson developed several variants in response. One included a cracked-looking dial intended to reinforce the crash theme; Jean-Jacques felt that went too far and asked him to tone it down. The cracked dial was abandoned, and a cleaner distorted form was approved.
Once Wright & Davies had fabricated the gold case, the watch passed to Eric Denton at 175 New Bond Street. The distorted outline created an unexpected complication: the dial numbers could not remain at their standard positions and still tell the time correctly. The dial had to be extracted and repainted by Emmerson, who lettered it by hand, multiple times before the watch read correctly. The result carries Emmerson's own hand-lettered "Cartier London" signature on the dial, a direct trace of his involvement in the finished object.
The original design drawing, produced by hand before a single case was made, is described in the blog post An Original Cartier Crash: Hand-drawn by Rupert Emmerson.
The Pebble
Emmerson also worked on the Cartier Pebble, the smooth, rounded watch produced in the early 1970s. Like the Crash, the Pebble was a handmade piece in which the unusual case form imposed significant complications at the assembly stage. Each watch took several months to complete.
Together, the Crash and the Pebble represent a body of work that distinguishes the Cartier London branch from the Paris and New York houses, and Emmerson's role in both places him among the small number of named designers whose individual contributions to Cartier's output can be traced from brief through finished object.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 11 ("The End of an Era, 1957–1974")
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), p. 253.
