Cartier Tank Cintrée: Specs, References, History and Value | Ultimate Watch
The Tank Cintrée is the long, curved Tank, the one that lies down the length of your wrist instead of sitting square on top of it. Cartier introduced it in 1921, four years after Louis Cartier drew the original Tank, and the name says exactly what changed: cintrée means curved. The case stretches to roughly 46mm top to bottom while staying about 23mm across, and the whole thing bows to follow the bone of the wrist. We buy and sell Cartier at 19 W 47th Street, and the Cintrée is the Tank that separates people who like Cartier from people who study it. It has never been a volume watch. It was a Cartier salon piece in the 1920s, it disappeared for decades, and it has only come back in tightly limited runs. That scarcity is the whole story on both the buy side and the sell side.
Collectors read a vintage Cintrée by its signature first: Paris, London, or New York on the dial changes the conversation and often the price, because each house made them in tiny numbers. The stretched Roman numerals and the curved chemin-de-fer minute track are the tells of a correct original dial, and a redial on a long dial like this is easy to spot and fatal to value. There is a well-worn line among collectors that a Cintrée from the 1940s will bring several multiples of one from the 1990s, which is a reminder that with this model, age and originality outweigh newness. The CPCP 2718 has become the sweet spot for buyers who want prewar shape with modern serviceability, and platinum examples are meaningfully scarcer than the gold. The thread running through all of it is restraint: the Cintrée never chased attention, and the market has rewarded it for exactly that.