A two-day box marine chronometer is read from directly above: a silvered brass plate, engine-turned and black-filled, carrying Roman numerals, a subsidiary seconds dial at VI and an up-and-down power-reserve sector at XII. The movement hangs in gimbals inside a three-tier mahogany box so the instrument stays level, and therefore keeps reading, at sea.

This system takes that face as its whole grammar. Structure is concentric, division is hairline, colour is near-absent — except the heat-blued steel of the hands, the one saturated tone on the instrument, spent only where something is live.