There is a mild contradiction in this configuration and it is what makes the watch interesting. A case of 18K 6N gold is the warmest, most obviously luxurious thing F.P. Journe puts a movement into, and what he has put inside it here is the least: the Automatique Reserve carries no moon phase, and this dial is white gold worked flat with its numerals cut by a diamond tool, which is about as cool and unornamented a face as the manufacture makes. Warm metal, cold content. What can be read from it is central hours and minutes, small seconds at 4:30, a large date and a power reserve indication at 9 o'clock, and nothing else at all. The case measures 40 mm across and stands 10.6 mm tall, and the reference ran until 2018 before it was withdrawn from the collection altogether.
The dial is the reason to choose this over the guilloche version, and the two are genuinely different propositions rather than color options. A whitened guilloche silver plate is engine turned across its whole surface, which fills the dial with fine repeating cuts and means no area of it ever reads as empty; that is forgiving on a watch with a moon phase and considerably more so on one without. A flat white gold plate does the opposite. It offers no texture to occupy the eye, so the space left by the absent moon in the lower right stays visibly and deliberately open, and the four indications have to hold the composition entirely on their own. The numerals help matters without softening any of it. Cut into the gold with a diamond tool rather than printed or applied, they carry a fine directional grain that takes light along one axis while the surrounding plate takes it along another, so they separate by texture rather than by brightness or relief. In a 6N gold case the cool dial reads cooler still by contrast, and the watch ends up considerably more austere than its metal would ever suggest from a distance. That gap between the promise of the case and the delivery of the dial is the whole character of the thing.
Power reaches the escapement through four wheels, and it is worth following that path properly, because everything about this movement is arranged around keeping the journey consistent from one end to the other. The barrel turns slowly under the force of the mainspring and drives the center wheel, which carries the minute hand and completes a rotation every hour; the center wheel drives the third wheel, the third drives the fourth, and the fourth carries the seconds and drives the escape wheel that releases the balance. At each engagement a little energy is lost to friction, and the ratios multiply speed while dividing torque, so the escape wheel turns quickly under very little force. That final delivery is what determines the rate of the watch, and it is precisely why the size of the barrel matters so much: a spring delivering steadily across five days keeps the force arriving at the escape wheel within a narrow band, whereas one that falls away quickly does not. Here the calibre 1300.3 runs to 259 parts and 37 jewels at 21,600 alternations per hour, with a mainspring a meter in length, an off-center 22K gold rotor winding in one direction, a 10.1 mm free-sprung balance regulated by four inertia weights, and 160 hours of autonomy of which the first 120 are underwritten as chronometric.
There is a detail in the catalog structure worth noticing at this point: the gold-dial versions of this reference were offered at 40 mm only, whereas the guilloche silver versions could be had at either 38 mm or 40 mm. That was not an oversight on somebody's part. A flat metal dial with widely spaced worked numerals needs room to breathe, and compressing that layout into 38 mm would have pushed the indications toward each other until the openness that justifies the design disappeared. The guilloche versions survive that reduction perfectly well, because the engine turning carries the surface at any size you care to make it. It is a small illustration of something this manufacture does with great consistency, which is to let the requirements of a design determine what actually gets offered, rather than filling out a grid of every combination a spreadsheet might suggest. Most manufactures would have made the 38 mm gold dial anyway, on the reasoning that some customer somewhere might want one. Journe apparently concluded that it would not work properly and simply declined to make it at all, which is the sort of decision that costs a manufacture sales in the short run and preserves its reputation over the long one.
This is the Automatique Reserve for the collector who wants the warmth of red gold without a trace of the softness that usually accompanies it. It is a harder watch than any of the guilloche executions, less immediately charming, and it takes rather longer to appreciate properly, which is a description that fits a good deal of this catalog. Anyone drawn to the gold case because it looks generous from across a room should understand that the dial will not meet them halfway on anything. The reference has been out of production since 2018, so the secondary market is now the only route to one. Inspect the diamond-tooled numerals under raking light with genuine care, since the graining is shallow by nature and any refinishing destroys it permanently, and a dial looking unusually fresh for its age deserves suspicion rather than relief. Then sit with it and watch the date jump at midnight to confirm that both discs move together and instantaneously, and run the reserve down far enough to watch the indication cross the whole length of its scale.
