Everything on this watch is warm apart from the counters. The case is 18K 6N gold, which is the reddest metal F.P. Journe works in. The dial plate is 5N gold, warm but a shade less so. The movement behind it is brass, from the period before the manufacture switched its plates and bridges to solid 18K rose gold, and brass under its gilt finish is warmer again. Only the three subdials break the pattern, cut in whitened guilloche silver and screwed down with steel circles. This is the Octa Chronographe at its most unified, a flyback with a sixty-minute counter and a large date, in a 38 mm case, from the earliest part of a run that lasted only from 2004 to 2008. It has been out of production for a very long time now, and no direct successor was ever made.
The subdials are doing all the work of legibility here and they have to, because nothing else on the dial is going to help them. On a platinum-cased version of this watch the case supplies a cool frame that separates the warm plate from the wrist and gives the eye a fixed reference to work from. Here there is no such frame. The 6N case and the 5N plate sit within a shade of one another, so the watch reads as one continuous warm field from the crown to the center of the dial, and the only interruptions anywhere are the three pale counters and the hands. That places an unusual burden on the silver of the subdials. Journe met it by keeping the subdials properly bright rather than merely lighter than their surroundings, by ringing each in polished steel so it has a hard edge, and by engine-turning the surfaces so they hold their brightness across a range of angles. Without those steel circles the counters would simply float on the surface; with them they read instead as instruments properly set into a plate. The case stands 10.6 mm tall with a sapphire crystal in the back, through which the brass plates are immediately visible and settle the question of period.
There is a hierarchy of hands on any chronograph, and this particular dial states it more plainly than most. The chronograph seconds hand is mounted at the center and sweeps the full diameter of the dial, which is the most prominent position available. The running seconds, the hand that actually tells you the watch is alive, is relegated to a small subdial. That arrangement looks backward at first and is nothing of the sort. A chronograph seconds hand is read against a scale in order to take a specific measurement, and it needs the longest possible pointer travelling over the finest possible graduations to be read properly, so it quite rightly takes the center. The running seconds needs only to confirm the watch is going, which a small hand does perfectly well. The hours and minutes then get their own subdial rather than the center, which is the arrangement that makes this dial distinctive. Every position on the face has been assigned according to what that particular indication actually requires, rather than according to convention or to habit. The calibre 1300.3 running all of it holds 254 parts and 32 jewels at 21,600 alternations per hour, carrying a reserve of 120 hours and wound by an off-center 22K gold rotor turning in a single direction.
The year 2004 does more work in this manufacture's history than any other single year, and this particular watch sits directly on top of it. That is the year in which the Octa Chronographe was introduced to the catalog. It is also, to within a very short margin indeed, the year in which Journe stopped making his movements from brass altogether and began making them instead from solid 18K rose gold. A watch carrying both of those facts at once is therefore pinned to a matter of months rather than to a period of years, which is an unusual degree of precision for dating a watch that carries no visible serial information anywhere on its dial at all. Collectors now treat the brass movement as the single defining marker of the manufacture's first era, and the estimates put total brass output across every reference at somewhere in the region of two thousand pieces in all. A brass-movement Octa Chronographe is therefore a small subset of an already very small number, because the chronograph was brand new and the brass was ending at precisely the same moment. The two facts intersect very briefly indeed and then never do so again in the manufacture's history.
This is a watch for somebody who wants the warmest and the earliest version of a reference that was never plentiful in the first place. Gold on gold with a brass movement behind it is about as unified as the Octa Chronographe ever gets, and the pale counters are the only thing keeping the whole composition from tipping into monotony. It is also the configuration that most rewards being seen in proper daylight, since artificial light collapses the distinction between the 6N case and the 5N plate almost entirely. Verify the brass movement through the caseback before anything else, because that is the entire basis on which the watch is being bought, and establish the date of manufacture from the original papers wherever they happen to survive. Then exercise the chronograph fully: start it, stop it, reset it, and confirm that the hands land exactly on zero rather than near it. Use the flyback from a running start to check that the reset and the restart occur together as one clean motion, and have the full service history confirmed with the manufacture rather than any independent workshop.
