The Art Of Watchmaking With A. Lange & Söhne
- Name
- A. Lange & Söhne
- Images
- Franz Grünewald
- Words
- Charmaine Li
Our series “The Genesis of Craftsmanship”, in collaboration with A. Lange & Söhne, takes us into the studios of makers whose painstaking manual work is carrying the time-honoured tradition of their crafts into the future. For the final instalment, we turned the spotlight onto the German watchmakers themselves and visited their manufactory in Glashütte to explore the craftsmanship that goes into each timepiece.
Located in Germany’s Saxony state, Glashütte is home to A. Lange & Söhne, and it’s also the birthplace of the country’s watchmaking industry. Founded in 1845, A. Lange & Söhne continues to produce timepieces that combine precision and craftsmanship with quality materials and elegant details to this day. Inside the manufactory, finishers and watchmakers can be seen decorating and assembling individual microscopic parts by hand to ensure that each watch meets the highest precision standards. It seems that everything from design and construction to polishing, engraving and regulating is done with meticulous attention.
Recently, A. Lange & Söhne presented its latest series of watches featuring blue dials. Why blue? Perhaps because the colour has held a particularly special place in the hearts and minds of artists and scientists alike. Leonardo da Vinci, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky are among the many visionaries that have been preoccupied with the colour blue.
The four models in the watchmaker’s ‘Blue Series’ draw from this fascination with the colour and feature complementary stylistic details like white-gold cases and a hand-stitched dark-blue leather strap.
– In collaboration with A. Lange & Söhne –
All images © Franz Grünewald for iGNANT Production. Text by Charmaine Li.
