Eighteen complications, seven hundred and fifty-eight components, and one example. The Astronomic Blue was built for the Only Watch auction of 2019, the biennial charity sale that funds research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and it was the most complicated thing Francois-Paul Journe had ever made. It was also a prototype in the literal sense: the production version, the Astronomic Souveraine, followed a year later in steel, and this tantalum piece is the watch that proved the design worked. Journe has entered Only Watch since 2015 with a standing rule for himself, a tantalum case and a blue dial every time, so the Astronomic Blue belongs to a short line of unique watches that share a look and share nothing else at all. Only one of each was ever built.
Tantalum is the reason the watch looks the way it does. It is one of the hardest metals to machine, it wears gray-blue rather than white, and almost nobody in the industry uses it because the tooling is punitive and the finishing is slow. Journe adopted it for the Chronometre Bleu and has kept it for the Only Watch pieces, where the difficulty is part of the gift. The case here is 44 mm across and 13.8 mm deep, the same footprint as the Sonnerie Souveraine and the vertical tourbillon, which is as large as the house builds. The dial is chrome blue, mirrored rather than matte, with whitened guilloche silver worked into the subsidiary registers so the two surfaces read at different depths. Three sets of hands share the face, blued steel, gilt 5N steel and an ivory-toned steel, each color assigned to a different indication so that eighteen functions can be read without a legend beside them. Silver shutters track the daily movement of the sun across the dial. On the reverse the case opens onto a second display, which is where the equation of time and the calendar live, so the watch has two fronts and no back. Nothing about the exterior was softened for the auction; the case shape follows the Sonnerie rather than the dress watches, with a flat bezel, straight flanks and lugs cut short so a 44 mm watch stays on a normal wrist.
What the eighteen functions cover is worth setting out carefully, because the point of the watch is the density rather than any single indication. On the visible face there are hours and a second time zone at three, minutes from the center, sunrise and sunset at twelve, sidereal hours and minutes at nine, a moon phase at five and the seconds on a disc at seven. Turn the case over and the equation of time runs from the middle with an annual calendar at ten, alongside the tourbillon. The tourbillon carries a constant force device, and the seconds beat in whole steps rather than sliding between them. Over all of it sits a minute repeater that strikes hours, quarters and minutes on demand. Sidereal time is the unusual inclusion, a scale used by astronomers rather than by anyone setting an appointment, and the equation of time and the sunrise and sunset displays belong to the same family of indications: things the sky does, rendered mechanically. Every one of these functions is set through the crown alone, with no correctors hidden in the lugs and no pushers on the band, which is the quiet achievement underneath the obvious one. Journe has said that adding functions is the easy part and that making them all correctable from one control is where the work goes, and on a watch with eighteen indications the claim is easy to believe.
The idea is older than the watch. In 1987 Journe built a pocket watch with a planetarium for a collector of scientific instruments, a tourbillon showing mean time, sidereal time, the equation of time and a full calendar, and that piece sat in his history for three decades as the most ambitious thing he had made. The Astronomic Blue is the answer to it. He has said the movement had to be new rather than a scaled version of the old one, and the result shares an intention with the 1987 watch rather than a construction. In the sequence of Only Watch entries it is the third and the largest step: a tourbillon in 2015, a split-seconds chronograph in 2017, then this. Each of those became a production reference afterwards, and the Astronomic followed the same path in 2020 when the steel Astronomic Souveraine entered the catalogue at four or five pieces a year. What separates the Blue from the production watch is the case metal, the dial, some of the inscriptions and the state of the movement finishing, which was left deliberately raw. The bridges and base plate are rose gold, as they are on every Journe, but the decoration was not completed, so the Blue shows the movement in a state that no other watch from the house has ever been sold in. It is a finished watch built around an unfinished mechanism, which is exactly what a prototype is.
There is nothing to compare this to, which makes the usual collector reasoning difficult. It is a unique piece, it is the most complicated watch the house has built, and it exists because of a charity auction rather than a commercial decision, so it will not reappear in any form other than the steel production version. For anyone tracking the Only Watch sequence it is the center of the group, since the earlier two were reworkings of existing references and this one was a new movement built from nothing. For anyone tracking tantalum it is the largest and most complicated case the metal has been cut into. The practical point is that a watch of this kind is bought once and rarely moves, so the population that can circulate is effectively zero, and its whereabouts is a matter of record rather than of search. Anyone pursuing it should expect to be pursuing a specific known object rather than a market.
