Audemars Piguet Spent $7.7 Million Buying Back Its Own Watch. Now It's Taking It on Tour

In December 2025, Audemars Piguet sat in a room at Sotheby's New York and bid against four other collectors for a pocket watch it made in 1921. It paid $7.7 million, seven times the high estimate, and announced with considerable dignity that the piece would be returning to Le Brassus where it belonged. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. We covered the story in full when the hammer fell, and you can read that piece here: Audemars Piguet Buys Grosse Pièce for $7.7 Million at Sotheby's New York.

The watch in question is the Grosse Pièce, which translates simply as Big Piece, a name that tells you almost nothing about what it actually is. It is a pocket watch commissioned in 1914, completed seven years later in 1921, housing nineteen complications in 18-carat yellow gold. It contains a minute repeater, a grande and petite sonnerie, a chronograph, a perpetual calendar, moon phases, an equation of time display, a planisphere depicting the night sky over London with 315 individual stars, and a tourbillon, the only one Audemars Piguet is known to have placed in a pocket watch from that era. It is, in the words of the people who study these things most seriously, the horological equivalent of Patek Philippe's Henry Graves Supercomplication. A once-in-a-generation object.

Having spent $7.7 million bringing it home, Audemars Piguet has very reasonably decided that other people should get to see it.

The Perspectives on Time Exhibition

From September 10 to 13, the Grosse Pièce went on public display for the first time as part of AP's Perspectives on Time exhibition at The Gallery Theatre within the National Museum of Singapore. Free to attend across thirty-minute sessions, it closed its doors yesterday, though the response from collectors and press who attended suggests it was worth the trip.

The exhibition was structured across four rooms, each exploring a different dimension of 151 years of Audemars Piguet watchmaking. The first, Looking Back and Beyond, traced the manufacture's history through archival pieces including the original 1972 Royal Oak designed by Gérald Genta, the watch that arguably saved the Swiss luxury watch industry by proving that steel could be as desirable as gold, and an extraordinary 1991 ultra-thin movement concealed inside a genuine 1904 US twenty-dollar gold coin, which is either a technical triumph or the horological equivalent of hiding a Ferrari engine inside a bicycle. Possibly both.

The second room, Guided by the Cosmos, was where the Grosse Pièce took centre stage. Positioned alongside modern astronomical complications including the aventurine-dialed Code 11.59 Perpetual Calendar, the 1921 pocket watch served as the anchor of a narrative about humanity's relationship with celestial time. The contrast between what could be achieved by hand in 1921 and what can be achieved with modern manufacturing in 2026 is the exhibition's most quietly powerful argument, and it does not need any explanatory text to land.

The third room, The Beauty Within, was dedicated to openworking, the practice of removing material from a movement until the architecture of the mechanism itself becomes the decoration. A circa 1770 decorative pocket watch signed by Lépine Paris anchored one end of the timeline. An ultra-thin skeletonised wristwatch from 1976 and the contemporary 2017 Royal Oak Tourbillon Chronograph completed it. The room made the case, convincingly, that removing things is harder than adding them.

The final room, Giving Time a Voice, covered striking watches, minute repeaters, sonneries, and chiming complications, and included an 1895 Grande Sonnerie and a 1921 five-minute repeater produced for Tiffany and Co. measuring just 15.8mm in diameter, which is an achievement of miniaturisation so precise it borders on the implausible.

Why the Grosse Pièce Matters

The story of the Grosse Pièce is in some ways the story of Audemars Piguet's early identity. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the manufacture operated as a high-end private label movement maker, producing some of the most complicated watches in existence for prestigious retailers including S. Smith and Son in London, who commissioned the Grosse Pièce, and J.W. Benson. The watches were extraordinary. The AP name was largely invisible on the dial.

The decision to spend $7.7 million reacquiring this particular piece in its 150th anniversary year is not simply about adding to the museum. It is about making something previously invisible very visible indeed. A watch made in 1921 for a London retailer, that spent decades in a private collection, has now been brought home and shown to the public in Singapore as the centrepiece of an exhibition about everything AP has learned and built in a century and a half. The Grosse Pièce is no longer invisible. It is the most prominent object in the room.

For collectors who missed Singapore, the next exhibition dates have not yet been confirmed. Given the investment AP has made in both acquiring the watch and staging the exhibition, further international dates seem likely. Worth keeping an eye on AP's official channels if you want to see the Grosse Pièce in person before it returns to Le Brassus permanently.