For vintage Cartier watch enthusiasts, sleuthing is half the fun

In 2022, an unusual Cartier watch hit the auction block in Paris. With a yellow gold case modelled after a North African head scarf and Cartier’s signature Roman numeral dial, the Cartier Cheich (pronounced “shesh”) was as remarkable as it was rare. The watch had been created in 1983 for the Cartier Challenge, an award for any driver who won the infamously gruelling Paris-Daker Rally off-road vehicle race twice and was believed to be the only one of its kind. Following a winning bid of US$1.1-million (far above the US$400,000 estimate), the Cheich became one of the most valuable Cartier watches of all time.
Just as the sale of actor Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona for US$18-million in 2017 created a frenzy for vintage Rolex chronographs, the Cheich auction amped up interest in historic Cartier watches. What aspiring collectors would soon discover, however, is that with a century’s worth of history, extremely limited production numbers and a dearth of reliable information online, hunting down the vintage Cartier watch of your dreams can be a labour of love.
“Collecting rare vintage Cartier watches can be a challenging endeavour, requiring a greater degree of detective work than many other brands,” says Francesca Cartier Brickell, author of The Cartiers (and great-great-great granddaughter of the Maison’s founder, Louis Cartier). She speaks from experience. After spending a decade researching the company’s complex and colourful history for her first book, Cartier-Brickell is now at work documenting Cartier’s equally rich, diverse and fragmented legacy as a watchmaker. “But equally, this multifaceted history contributes to the allure of antique Cartier timepieces,” she says. “Production volumes were so low that each example plays its own part in the story.”
For much of the 20th century, the only places you could buy a new Cartier watch was at a handful of Cartier boutiques in Paris, London, New York and Palm Beach – a major contrast to other watch brands with wares available at retailers in every major city. “Until the beginning of the ‘70s, there were only a very limited number of Cartier stores, and only Cartier stores were selling watches, so production accordingly was reduced,” says Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s image, style and heritage director. “We were a jeweller and our watches were the watches of a jeweller. It was not seen as a possible strategy to sell our production in other points of sale; the question was not even raised at the time within the company.”
Because so few watches were produced (Cartier is believed to have made just 6,000 Tanks between 1920 and 1970) it can be hard to know for sure if the watch you’re buying is in pristine condition with its original case, dial and movement, or has been altered over the years, making it far less valuable in the eyes of discerning collectors. Because most vintage Cartiers are “about as waterproof as cotton candy” in the words of one expert, it can be hard to find one with all its original parts intact. “I have a Cartier Santos-Dumont from 1912 and the dial was refinished at some point by Cartier, but I’ll happily wear it,” says Kevin O’Dell, a vintage watch dealer and Cartier enthusiast who posts his finds on his Instagram account, @theydid. “Because find me a Cartier from 1912 with an original dial – they just don’t exist.”
For early-1970s Cartiers – to choose one particularly collectible example – one dial may look very much like another, but to a trained eye tiny differences abound. On @cartier_chronicles, New York-based collector Matt Tanaka has compiled some of these subtleties in a series of infographic slideshows on covetable models such as the Ceinture and Cristallor. Early 1970s models, he points out, feature a flat-topped letter “A” in Cartier while mid-decade versions used a pointier font, and models from the end of the decade feature Cartier’s so-called “secret signature,” with the word Paris spelled out in miniature within the Roman numeral VII. “It’s overwhelming, even for me,” O’Dell says. “I’ve been doing this since 2017 and I’m still learning new stuff all the time.”
Some enterprising enthusiasts, like Geneva-based vintage watch dealer brothers Sacha and Roy Davidoff, have taken their research further still. “As a fun side project, I had asked my brother a while back how many Cartier Tank variants and names exist, and we had a bet going that there were over 20,” Sacha Davidoff says. After several years and much sleuthing at auctions and other watch collecting events, he now has a list of 42 distinct Tank models that he intends to eventually publish.
For those lucky enough to gain access to it, Cartier’s fabled archive holds the answers to many of these questions. “We have many requests from external researchers and writers, and we help them as far as we can,” Rainero says. For the rest, there’s always eBay. Rainero suggests picking up a copy of Franco Coligni’s The Cartier Tank Watch, first published in 1996, as a particularly good source of information on that model, along with vintage Cartier catalogues that occasionally pop up for sale online. “The only information that is not available is the exact quantities produced, and this is something we don’t disclose,” he says. “But collectors make their own calculations.”