Don't miss the next drop
Collectors gave this LeCoultre Aristocrat its Grasshopper nickname, and the lugs are the reason. They splay out from the case like legs caught mid-stride. The nickname was never stamped anywhere on the watch. It stuck because it fit.
The piece also carries a story most of its Swiss contemporaries cannot tell. Turn it over and the inner caseback reads CASED AND TIMED IN U.S.A. BY LeCoultre. Through the middle of the last century, movements like this one were built in Switzerland and shipped to the United States, where they were cased, regulated, and sold under the LeCoultre name alone. Everywhere else in the world the same firm signed its work Jaeger-LeCoultre. Casing the watches on American soil sidestepped the steep tariffs on finished Swiss watches and put a domestic stamp on a genuinely Swiss movement. American buyers knew the brand simply as LeCoultre, and that difference still sets a US-market piece like this apart from its European cousins.
The caliber inside is signed the same way. Its bridge reads LeCoultre Co., 490/BW, seventeen jewels, unadjusted Swiss. It is a compact manual-wind movement built for a dress watch and nothing more, with no seconds hand to crowd the dial and no complication to chase. It was made to tell the time quietly and sit flat under a cuff, which is still exactly what it does.
The LeCoultre Aristocrat line took in this kind of expressive, asymmetric case, and this example commits to the shape fully. The 10k gold filled case tapers and steps out to those flared lugs, holding the strap well clear of the wrist. Its flanks carry the fine scratches any watch of this age earns, and the outer caseback is stamped 10K. GOLD FILLED, a bonded layer of solid gold rather than the thin plating of lesser watches. The dial has aged to a warm tan with light foxing that reads as honest wear rather than damage. Under the crystal, applied gold arrowheads and dots mark the hours and gold dauphine hands cross the center, and the whole watch rides on a brown lizard-grain strap.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our two-year mechanical warranty, it is ready to wear as it comes. The lizard-grain strap suits its warmth, though a dark calf or a black cord would push it toward evening. A watch like this was never meant to disappear on the wrist. It was meant to have a silhouette recognizable across a room, and seventy years on, this one still does.
