Curse of the £15m watch strikes again...
Sheikh owner died just 2 days before it was sold
IT is known as the most elaborate and beautiful watch i n the world – a £15million masterpiece of breathtaking craftsmanship and exquisite design.
But the 1933 Patek Philippe which came to be known as the Graves Supercomplication was said to be blighted by a deadly curse.
The so-called holy grail of timepieces brought a litany of bad luck for multi-millionaire US banker Henry Graves Jr throughout the years he owned it.
Now the curse appears to have struck again. Hours before an undisclosed buyer bought it at auction in Geneva for a record 23million Swiss francs, time had already run out for the man who put it up anonymously for sale.
The seller was subsequently revealed to be Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani, hailed as one of the world’s richest men – who died mysteriously at his London home on Sunday. The 48- year- old Qatari royal privately bought the fabulous watch 15 years ago for $11million.
It became part of a massive art collection he built up through a love of fine works and access to a seemingly bottomless pit of money.
No details were made public about his death but it was widely reported he had died ‘unexpect- edly’ at his London residence. The watch’s provenance and ‘curse’ was chronicled yesterday in the Daily Mail. In 1925 Graves secretly approached Patek Philippe to make him the planet’s ‘most complicated watch’, with two faces and 24 complications, or extra settings.
One face shows the phases of the moon, another the New York sunset and sunrise times. It has an alarm, a stopwatch and perpetual calendar.
But seven months after Graves took possession, his best friend died. Months later his son George was killed in a car crash, the second of his sons to die this way.
One day aboard his l uxury yacht with his daughter Gwendolen, he stared morosely at the watch and declared: ‘Such things bring one nothing but trouble.’
Had he tossed it into the ocean that day, the curse would have ended. After his death, the watch passed without issue through the hands of his daughter, grandson, an Illinois industrialist and a museum. Then came the Sheikh. The Qatari prince, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the art world, long admired the watch and kept it as part of his personal collection. That included anything and everything that caught his eye, from great paintings to fast, beautiful cars.
He was a cousin of Qatar’s current emir, and was responsible f or developing l i braries and museums, for which he acquired a staggering catalogue of artworks while promoting Qatari culture. According to The Art Newspaper he spent more on art in an eight-year spree from 1997 than any known individual.
But two years ago the High Court in London froze some of his assets in a legal wrangle with auction houses over millions of pounds in disputed invoices. He is believed to have handed over the watch to Sotheby’s, and it was sold on Tuesday, to help pay off his debts.