Putting a white gold dial inside a red gold case is a deliberate inversion, and it produces the coolest-looking warm-metal watch F.P. Journe made in this reference. The case is 18K 6N gold at 40 mm, which reads distinctly red; the dial is white gold, which does not; and the numerals cut into that dial are surfaced with a diamond tool so they grain rather than shine. Nothing about that combination is accidental. Set against the alternative, which is a whitened guilloche silver dial in the very same case, this version comes out sharper, more architectural and considerably less soft. The layout is the centralized Automatique Lune arrangement: hours and minutes from the middle, small seconds at 4:30, a large date, the power reserve at 9 o'clock and a moon phase. It has since been withdrawn from the collection.
A solid gold dial is a fundamentally different object from a silver one, and it behaves differently under light in ways that are easy to see once pointed out. Silver, whitened and engine turned, scatters light softly and reads almost as a textile surface; white gold worked flat reads as metal and returns light more directly, which makes the dial feel harder and gives the indications crisper edges against it. Journe then cuts the hour numerals with a diamond tool rather than printing or applying them, which leaves a fine directional grain in the gold. Those figures take light along one axis while the plate behind them takes it along another, so the numerals separate themselves from the dial by texture rather than by color or by relief, and they remain legible from a considerable range of angles without ever becoming bright. It is a more laborious way to make a numeral than printing one, and a considerably more restrained one than applying a polished marker, which is entirely characteristic of the house. The dial gives up brightness in exchange for holding its legibility across a wider range of angles. The case is 10.6 mm tall with a sapphire crystal set into the back, and the watch was delivered on an alligator strap with a matching gold buckle.
The power reserve indication is the display that people understand least well, and it is worth explaining what the thing is actually measuring. A watch has no way of sensing stored energy directly. What a reserve indicator actually does is track the difference between two rotations, the winding of the barrel from one side and its unwinding through the going train from the other, and report the gap between them. Journe uses a differential gear to subtract one of those rotations from the other, so that the output shaft turns only by the net amount, advancing as the mainspring is wound and retreating steadily as it runs down again. That output shaft drives the hand at 9 o'clock across a scale marked in hours remaining rather than in degrees of wind, and on this particular movement that scale runs the full 120. The mechanism is a good deal more involved than the simplicity of the display suggests, which is precisely why plenty of watches carrying long reserves decline to indicate them at all and leave the owner to guess. Behind it sits the calibre 1300.3, running to 271 parts and 36 jewels at 21,600 alternations per hour, with plates and bridges in 18K rose gold and a free-sprung balance measuring 10.1 mm across.
Dial material is a genuine choice at this manufacture rather than a finishing detail settled late, and the Automatique Lune was offered both ways quite deliberately. The silver dials are engine turned, whitened, printed with their numerals and fitted with blued steel hands, which places them squarely in a long tradition of French and Swiss dialmaking, and they give the watch a faintly antique register in consequence. The gold dials, worked with a diamond tool, place the watch somewhere else entirely: they are unmistakably modern in feel, they take considerably longer to produce, and they were generally paired with rhodium plated or gilt hands rather than blued ones. Journe has never treated either one as the senior option, and both ran alongside each other throughout the reference's entire production life, from 2007 through to its withdrawal in 2018. What the choice actually decides is whether the dial recedes quietly behind the indications sitting on it or asserts itself alongside them as an equal element. The guilloche versions recede, and do so willingly. This one does not, and a buyer who wants the moon phase and the large date to sit on a surface with a presence of its own should be looking at a gold dial rather than a silver one.
This is much the more formal of the two gold-cased Automatique Lunes, and it is the one that suits being worn with a jacket rather than without one. Red gold outside and white gold inside gives the watch a duality that a matched pairing simply would not, and the combination wears rather better in practice than the specification on paper suggests it might. The reference has been out of production since 2018, so the secondary market is now the only available route to owning one. The diamond-tooled numerals are the element to inspect most carefully of all, since the graining is shallow by nature and any refinishing of the dial destroys it permanently, so a dial that looks unusually clean for its age ought to invite scrutiny rather than reassurance. Beyond that, watch the date jump at midnight to confirm both discs move together and instantaneously, run the reserve down far enough to watch the indication travel the whole length of its scale, and advance the moon through a complete cycle to check the wheel train sitting behind it.
