Ear goes: Artist recreates three microscopic Van Gogh masterpieces inside tourbillon

Luke Benedictus

David Lindon is a micro artist who makes artworks so small they can fit inside the eye of a needle. They’re so tiny that he once breathed too hard and an artwork disappeared up his nose.  “I inhaled it by accident, and poof. It was gone,” the British artist told The Washington Post. “To do what I do, you practically have to work yourself into a trance. I guess you could say that I must be mad.” Now Lindon has applied his nanoscopic skills to the wrist in the form of a watch that is getting billed as the “world’s first wearable art gallery”.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Lindon has created the Vincent Van Gogh Trilogy Masterpiece Watch that re-creates three of the artist’s most famous paintings — “Starry Night,” “Sunflowers” and “Self-Portrait” in micro form. Each of the three artworks measures around 0.5mm and took two months to complete. The teeny-tiny replicas have been placed on the arms of a tourbillon, so that each are permanently visible – assuming you have miraculously good eyesight.

The watch housing these paintings is a hand-wound mechanical tourbillon, the Zeroo Time Archer T4.  Zeroo Time are a Japanese brand that were founded in 2017 and that specialise in original, avant-garde designs.

The Van Gogh watch is being sold by Hammond Galleries in the UK for 150,000 pounds (A$290,000). That’s clearly a massive outlay, but is presumably driven by the fact that the watch is a true one-off, a piece unique created in tandem with a singular type of artist. A standard-issue version of the Zeroo Time Archer T4 retails for US$2385 (A$3587).

Reproducing artworks in watches is not a new phenomenon. Last year, Vacheron Constantin released their Métiers d’Art Tribute to Great Civilisations that brought emblematic works from four of the world’s most significant cultures to the wrist.

Meanwhile in 2021, Jaeger-LeCoultre released the Reverso Tribute Enamel Hidden Treasures, a series of watches that featured three paintings that had been hidden from the world for many decades. They included works by Gustav Klimt, Gustave Courbet and, coincidentally, Vincent Van Gogh (pictured). No horological artworks have ever been done on such a tiny scale, however, as the Vincent Van Gogh Trilogy Masterpiece Watch.