NEW YORK (January 8, 2025) – According to the traditional Chinese calendar, 2025 is the Year of the Wooden Snake. To mark the occasion, Arnold & Son has created the Perpetual Moon 41.5 “Year of the Snake,” an eight-piece timepiece series in red gold that combines a manufacture caliber with a large astronomical moon and aventurine glass dial base. The complication has become a brand signature, often accompanied by delicately worked artistic elements, here, depicting a masterful interpretation of the Year of the Snake.
Arnold & Son celebrates the Chinese zodiac calendar with Perpetual Moon 41.5 “Year of the Snake.” Under this element, the reptile foretells transformation and a need for self-improvement, combined with energy and introspection. It is a year of negotiations, shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
PRUDENCE
In the inimitable tradition of Arnold & Son’s ornamental horology, this year is dedicated to a new “Chinese calendar” limited edition in the Perpetual Moon collection. The dial of the timepiece centers on an undulating snake. It faces the observer, wrapped around the branch of a tree that offers innumerable benefits: ginkgo biloba. The animal looks on calmly, nestled peacefully in a nocturnal setting.
FINESSE
The snake is delicately hand-engraved into a block of 18-karat rose gold and set against a blue aventurine glass dial. Its fine scales, forked tongue, and broad, flat head are depicted with realism. The large, mother-of-pearl moon, also rendered realistically with its shadows, is overlaid with Super-LumiNova. It illuminates an aventurine glass sky and is surrounded by the constellations of Ursa Major and Cassiopeia, which are also painted with luminescent material.
The choice of these star patterns is a direct allusion to the history of marine chronometer-maker John Arnold. They have served as guiding lights since the dawn of time. Midway between them lies the Pole Star, which unerringly indicates the north. Here, the importance of the stars in determining periods, thresholds, and symbols in the Chinese zodiac calendar forms a unique point of cultural and graphic convergence.
EXCELLENCE
On the case back, a secondary display of the phases of the moon allows fast and accurate adjustment of the complication. The manually-wound caliber that powers Perpetual Moon 41.5 Red Gold “Year of the Snake” tracks the age of the moon with exceptional accuracy. The total duration of a lunar cycle is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.8 seconds. Arnold & Son has approached this so closely that it would take 122 years for this movement, if constantly wound up, to accumulate a 24-hour discrepancy between the display and astronomical reality.
Like all Arnold & Son’s movements, the A&S1512 caliber was entirely developed, produced, decorated, assembled, adjusted, and finished at the manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds. This caliber uses two barrels and offers an oscillation frequency of 3 Hz, giving a 90-hour power reserve.


ABOUT ARNOLD & SON
Arnold & Son is named after John Arnold, a renowned English watchmaker of the 18th century. The golden age of maritime explorations and discoveries ushered this precision into a new technical ideal – determining longitude at sea. Its immediate corollary was the identification of local time, which changed constantly as the observer moved along an east-west axis. Astronomy, chronometry, and what we now call world time are thus inextricably linked within one and the same question, to which John Arnold and his son devoted their lives, their art, and their genius.
This is how these three dimensions – Astronomy, Chronometry and World Time – have come to be embodied in the House’s contemporary timepieces. Echoes of John Arnold’s inventions and preoccupations, these principles represent the foundations on which the Arnold & Son collections are based. The twenty-plus calibers presented to date by Arnold & Son have all been designed and developed in-house and produced by its sister manufacturer, La Joux-Perret in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). This independence and creativity demonstrate the House’s ability to perpetuate John Arnold’s exceptional inventions.
For more information, visit arnoldandson.com.