Moritz Grossmann Celebrates Its Founder’s 200th Anniversary With The Black Enamel Dial Hamatic

Paying a tribute to the founder’s birth year, Moritz Grossmann introduces its latest novelty - the Hamatic with a black enamel dial. At first glance, it is a restrained 41 mm gold watch with a jet-black dial, applied Arabic numerals, and a small seconds counter at six o’clock. Turn it over, however, and the watch reveals its true argument: a self-winding mechanism built not around a conventional rotor, but around a swinging hammer - an idea borrowed from the earliest age of automatic pocket watches and reinterpreted with contemporary Saxon rigor.

The new Hamatic Enamel arrives as part of Moritz Grossmann’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of founder Carl Moritz Grossmann’s birth. The watch’s significance is not merely commemorative. This is one of the most conceptually coherent automatic watches being made today: a timepiece in which the winding system, the movement architecture, the finishing, and even the historical references all belong to the same intellectual world.

A Black Dial With Real Depth

The headline change is the black enamel dial. Enamel is among the oldest and most demanding surfaces in watchmaking yielding a surface with a depth and optical purity that painted dials cannot replicate. Here, that depth is especially effective.

Black enamel is not merely black, it has a liquid, almost lacquer-like quality, with a reflective smoothness that changes character as light moves across it. Against it, the applied Arabic numerals in rose gold or white gold stand with unusual clarity. The dial retains the Hamatic’s established architecture: a peripheral railway-style minute track, a subtly recessed small-seconds subdial at six o’clock, and handcrafted, polished gold or steel hour and minute hands.

Why the Hamatic Is Different

The Hamatic was introduced in 2018, and it remains one of the more quietly radical automatic watches of the modern era. Most automatic watches use a centrally mounted rotor that rotates through 360 degrees, using gravity and motion to wind the mainspring. Moritz Grossmann instead uses a pendulum-style hammer winding system - an idea with roots in late eighteenth-century automatic pocket watches, including those associated with Breguet.

The result is visually and mechanically distinctive. Rather than a full rotor sweeping across the movement, a hammer with a solid gold mass at its extremity swings in a short arc, loading the mainspring with each oscillation. It is less efficient in the brute mechanical sense than a modern bidirectional rotor, but it is more transparent, more sculptural, and more historically resonant. You do not simply see that the watch winds itself, you see how it winds itself.

The Movement as the Main Event

The caliber 106.0 is an in-house, pillar-constructed movement containing 312 components. It runs at 21,600 vph and delivers a 72-hour power reserve. Those specifications are strong, but the execution is what elevates them. The movement features the classic Saxon three-quarter plate in German silver, broad Glashütte ribbing, raised gold chatons, and violet-annealed screws. The balance cock is cantilevered and hand-engraved, with the year “1826” incorporated as a tribute to Carl Moritz Grossmann.

A Case That Lets the Watch Breathe

The Hamatic Enamel comes in a polished three-part 41 mm case, 11.35 mm thick, in either 18k rose gold or white gold. The sapphire crystals are anti-reflective coated on one side, front and back, and the watch is water-resistant to 30 meters. Moritz Grossmann’s signature conical crown completes the case.

The watches are delivered on hand-stitched alligator leather straps with gold prong buckles. The strap choice is conventional in the best sense: it supports the watch without competing with it.

Two References, Eight Pieces Each

Moritz Grossmann will produce the Hamatic Enamel in two references:

A Fitting Anniversary Statement

For collectors, the appeal of this novelty is easy to understand. The Hamatic Enamel offers a rare combination: an enamel dial, precious-metal case, limited production, and a genuinely unusual automatic winding system.

The watch is a reminder that the most interesting innovations in watchmaking are not always the loudest ones. Sometimes, they are found in the way a hammer swings across the back of a watch - and in the conviction that even a self-winding mechanism can be an occasion for beauty.