Watches and Wonders 2026: a comprehensive list of all the new Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso timepieces featuring Japanese art and enamelling

Ask any Grand Feu enameller and they will tell you that red is a difficult colour to get right. Metal oxides turn brown under heat unpredictably and achieving a vivid, stable red requires not only multiple firings but the ability to read a kiln’s behaviour with something approaching intuition. The ‘Hibiscus Rosa’ requires nine layers of enamel for its reds alone, fired at different temperatures across multiple sessions. 

The scene on the caseback places the Akialoa above a red hibiscus, the emblematic symbol of Hawaii, against a background of tropical greenery in graduated tones. Around the enamel work, 489 diamonds of nine different sizes have been snow-set individually into the metal, each held by microscopic beads, in a technique designed to make the metal surface essentially vanish beneath an unbroken field of sparkle. Unusually for a piece this ornate, the decorative scheme carries around the curved sides of the case—from caseback to bezel—without interruption, which requires the gemsetter to work across a three-dimensional surface rather than a flat plane. The manufacture puts the case decoration alone at 130 hours of Métiers Rares work; the bracelet version adds 60 hours of gemsetting on top. The price of red enamel, it turns out, is measured in time more than anything else.

The shift from pink gold to 18-karat white gold for the ‘Sakura’ watch is not an arbitrary material choice. The cooler, greyer register of white gold serves as a better foil for a decoration built around a white, red-crowned crane—a bird that carries extraordinary symbolic weight in Japanese culture, associated with longevity and good fortune—standing at the edge of a lake beneath a branch of cherry blossom. The enamel work handles the bird’s red crown, legs and principal wing feathers, as well as the pink blossoms and green reeds in the foreground; the crane’s body and upper wing feathers are snow-set with diamonds. So far, reasonably familiar territory for a Jaeger-LeCoultre Métiers Rares piece.

This watch marks the first time the manufacture’s gemsetter has used the snow-setting technique with coloured stones—mixing two shades of blue sapphires with brilliant-cut diamonds in the background of the scene to suggest the sparkle of sunlight on the surface of the lake. The move from a monochrome diamond field to a mixed-colour setting introduces a pictorial dimension to gem-setting that goes some way beyond the purely decorative. The neck and down feathers of the crane, for reference, are painted with a single-hair brush that the enameller crafts himself. 269 diamonds, 395 sapphires, 125 hours of gem-setting. The blue alligator strap feels almost modest by comparison.

Cherry blossom—sakura—has functioned as a metaphor for the transience of existence in Japanese literature and art for centuries, its cultural resonance running considerably deeper than its current status as a tourism shorthand. Jaeger-LeCoultre is at least drawing from a source with genuine depth. It is a limited run of twenty pieces.

The Hokusai programme is an interesting undertaking than it might appear at first glance. It began in 2018 with a Reverso Tribute Enamel reproduction of ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’—a safe, crowd-pleasing choice if there ever was one. But from 2021 onward, Jaeger-LeCoultre committed to working through Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai’s eight-piece series ‘A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces’ in its entirety: one piece in 2021, one in 2022, two in 2023 and now the final four in 2026. The decision to close the series completely rather than leave it perpetually open as a source of future commercial options says something about the manufacture’s intentions that the press appointments at Watches and Wonders, predictably, did not spell out directly.

The Waterfalls series holds a specific place in the history of Japanese art because it was the first time the theme of falling water had been treated in ukiyo-e painting. It also represents one of Hokusai’s earliest applications of Prussian blue—a synthetic pigment invented in Berlin in the early 18th century and imported into Japan from Europe in the early 19th century. Before its arrival, Japanese artists derived their blues from indigo and crushed semi-precious stones; Prussian blue offered a depth and permanence of colour that had no equivalent in the existing palette, and Hokusai took to it with notable enthusiasm. The graduated blue tones in the Waterfalls series are not simply aesthetically pleasing—they were technically impossible before this pigment existed, which makes them a record of a specific moment of change in Japanese visual art.

Reproducing those gradients on an enamel surface of two square centimetres is, by any reasonable standard, genuinely difficult. The Geneva technique used for the caseback miniatures requires a minimum of 14 enamel layers, each fired at 800 degrees Celsius, and approximately 80 hours of work per watch. The front dials—hand-guilloché patterns covered in four to five layers of translucent coloured enamel—add further time, bringing each complete watch to nearly 100 hours of decorative labour. And then there are the cartouches near the top of each caseback, which feature the original Japanese captions handwritten at microscopic scale, remaining legible.

All four share an 18-karat white gold Reverso Tribute case measuring 45.6 x 27.4mm, powered by the manually wound Calibre 822—a movement introduced in 1991 that measures 2.94mm in height, which is the primary reason the Reverso case can remain as slim as it does after all these decades. Each edition is limited to ten pieces.

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Hokusai had a habit of making human beings look small. In the Rōben Waterfall scene, tiny figures gather in the cleansing pool at the foot of the falls, dwarfed by the vertical rush of water above—a compositional observation about the relationship between human scale and natural scale that Hokusai returned to throughout the Waterfalls series without ever making it feel repetitive. The front dial pairs a barleycorn guilloché pattern—49 engraved lines requiring 147 passages of the rose-engine lathe in total—with a light walnut-brown enamel that sits comfortably alongside the warm tones of the caseback without competing with it. 

This is the most contemplative of the four prints. The waterfall here is rendered as something almost delicate—closer to silken strands than crashing force—and Hokusai populates the scene with pilgrims climbing steps toward the Kannon temple. It is a quieter image than the others, and the dial reflects that register: a wavy guilloché pattern beneath a translucent emerald-coloured enamel that is probably the most immediately striking of the four dial treatments when you see it face-on. The wavy pattern required 198 passages of the rose-engine lathe. The resulting shimmer beneath the enamel makes the time display feel almost incidental—which in a watch of this nature is arguably the correct hierarchy.

There is a story attached to the Yōrō Waterfall—that its waters were a divine gift capable of turning into sake—and Hokusai seems to have been charmed by it. The composition captures both the scale of the cascade and a certain quality of local myth, with human figures who look as though they know something about the water that visitors do not. The dial introduces a bamboo-style guilloché pattern finished in rich olive-coloured enamel, which feels genuinely new among the four treatments and sits well against the warm mid-tones of the caseback scene. To achieve this detailing of the guilloché, 144 passages of the lathe across 48 lines are required. If Tatler GMT had to choose between the pieces on the basis of the front dial alone, the Yōrō would be a serious contender.

The series closes with the most compositionally dramatic of the four scenes: a powerful stream over rocks, the calm lake above contrasting with the turbulent basin below, human figures going about ordinary business in the foreground as though completely indifferent to the spectacle behind them. Whether Hokusai intended that as social observation or simply saw it in the street and drew what he found, the effect is the same—a scene that is both specific and entirely universal. The herringbone-style guilloché dial finished in vibrant cyan-blue enamel is the most technically demanding of the four: 360 passages of the rose-engine lathe were required across 120 lines. It is also the most visually commanding of the front dials, and a fitting end to a project that has maintained its coherence across eight years without a single compromised entry.

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