Arnold & Son Perpetual Moon 41.5 Platinum ‘Horse of the Dunes’: Eight Pieces

Arnold & Son's Perpetual Moon 41.5 Platinum 'Horse of the Dunes' pairs hand-engraved white gold with an aventurine dial. Limited to 8 pieces, CHF 74,500.

What Caught Our Eye

• Platinum 950, 41.5 mm, reference 1GLBX.Z03A.C1479X: the Perpetual Moon “Horse of the Dunes” limits production to eight pieces at CHF 74,500 incl. VAT.
• An 18-carat white gold horse, hand-engraved from hooves to mane, occupies an aventurine glass dial as black as a moonless desert sky.
• The A&S1512 calibre tracks the full lunar cycle with accuracy requiring 122 years to accumulate a single day’s deviation.
• Dunes are hand-painted and charged with Super-LumiNova; mother-of-pearl moon discs glow iridescent in daylight and luminescent in darkness.

Design & Handcraft

Arnold & Son’s manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds constructs the “Horse of the Dunes” dial across several distinct layers, each demanding a different craft. The horse itself is an 18-carat white gold appliqué, hand-engraved to articulate taut muscles, a full mane and precise shadow across the coat. Beneath it, the ground plane is formed by a disc of black aventurine glass, its natural metallic flecks reading as a star-filled sky without any applied decoration.

Hand-painted dunes occupy the lower register of the dial, their relief shaped to suggest wind-driven sand. Luminescent material mixed into that paint layer means the landscape remains legible after dark. Two mother-of-pearl discs rotate to display the current moon phase, iridescent in daylight and Super-LumiNova-charged at night. The press release from Arnold & Son describes this scene as a tribute to “Man’s most noble conquest,” setting a horse free across a geography that belongs to the imagination rather than to any mapped terrain.

Movement & Precision

The A&S1512 is a manually wound calibre measuring 34 mm across and 5.35 mm tall, oscillating at 3 Hz with a 90-hour power reserve from two barrels. Its finishing follows the full manufacture protocol: rhodium-plated and circular-grained main plate, chamfered bridges in radiating Côtes de Genève, snail-finished wheels, and blued screws with polished heads. Every stage of development, decoration, assembly and casing is completed in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

Accuracy is the headline figure. The calibre reproduces the lunar cycle of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds with such fidelity that a one-day deviation would take 122 years to accumulate. A secondary moon-phase indicator on the case back allows rapid, precise adjustment when required.

Edition Context & Value

Eight pieces constitutes one of the most constrained production runs in contemporary haute horlogerie. At CHF 74,500, the price positions the “Horse of the Dunes” within the upper tier of Arnold & Son’s catalogue, where platinum case, hand-finishing and miniature-painting costs converge. For collectors in the Gulf tracking Watches and Wonders-adjacent releases, this edition offers the combination that drives secondary-market premiums: an extreme edition count, craft-intensive dial work, and a complication with demonstrable astronomical precision.

The strap is black alligator leather with a sand beige alligator lining, closed by a platinum 950 pin buckle. Water resistance is rated at 3 bar (30 m). Reference 1GLBX.Z03A.C1479X is available on request from Arnold & Son or an authorised retailer in the Middle East.

Specifications

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