Two full days of hand engraving, on each one of twenty dials. The Tourbillon Souverain Regence Circulaire was built in 2016 as a series of twenty pieces, and what separates it from a standard example is entirely the work on its face: a white gold dial carrying an exclusive hand-engraved Regence Circulaire decoration, with guilloche silver on the subdials. F.P. Journe gives the figure directly, two days of work by a Geneva craftsman for every watch. The case is 18K 6N gold at 40 mm and 9.9 mm deep. The movement is the calibre 1403, hand wound, a tourbillon with a constant force device and a dead beat seconds, with the hours and minutes at 3 o'clock, the small seconds at 6 and the power reserve at 12. The reserve runs to forty-two hours, and the series has not been repeated since.
Hand engraving and guilloche are routinely confused and this dial carries both, which makes it a useful place to separate them. Guilloche is machine work. A rose engine is a lathe with a pattern-following mechanism, and an operator turns the workpiece against a fixed cutter while a template controls the movement, producing a repeating geometric figure of great regularity. Hand engraving has no machine involved at all. A graver is pushed through the metal by the engraver's own hand, and every line on the dial is placed by judgment rather than by any template. The difference shows in the result. Machine work is perfectly even and repeats without deviation; hand work does not, and the small irregularities left behind are precisely what identify it as hand work. Regence refers to a French decorative style of the early eighteenth century, and the pattern applied here is circular in its organization, worked outward around the dial from the middle rather than laid across it in rows. Two days per watch is not a long time to spend engraving by comparison with some traditions, and it is an enormous amount of time to spend on a component the manufacture could have left perfectly plain at no cost to itself whatsoever. Nothing about the watch works better for it.
The dial therefore carries two entirely different kinds of decoration at once, and each of them occupies its own area of the face. The main plate is white gold, carrying the hand-engraved Regence Circulaire work. The subdials for the hours and minutes and for the seconds are silver, finished with machine guilloche in the ordinary way the manufacture has always used. Setting those two techniques side by side on one dial is a genuine risk, because a machined pattern placed next to a hand-cut one tends to make the hand work look irregular by direct comparison. What resolves the problem here is a matter of scale and of placement. The guilloche is confined to small circular areas that read as instruments, while the engraving covers the open field around them and reads as ornament, so the eye takes the two of them as different kinds of thing altogether rather than as two attempts at the same thing. The aperture for the tourbillon carriage then sits within the engraved field as a third element again, a plain opening with no decoration on it whatsoever and nothing framing it beyond the cut edge. Three treatments, three functions, one face, and the hierarchy between them is entirely legible once you know what you are looking at.
By 2016 the calibre 1403 had been in production for thirteen years and had only three left, which places this series near the very end of its run. That is worth knowing because it explains what kind of exercise it is. A manufacture with a mature movement and a decorative workshop at its disposal can do one of two things: develop an entirely new calibre, or find new things to do with the one it already has. F.P. Journe was doing both things at once in this period, since the vertical tourbillon arrived only three years afterward, and the small hand-decorated series are what came out of the second approach rather than the first. Twenty pieces is the natural scale for that kind of work, because the binding constraint is not the movement at all but the engraver, and a single craftsman working two days on every dial sets a hard ceiling on how many of them can ever exist. There is simply no way to build four hundred of these, whatever the demand might have been. The edition size here is a direct consequence of the technique rather than a marketing decision taken in advance, which is much the more honest kind of limit and the harder one to argue with.
Hand-engraved work varies from one example to the next, so examine this particular dial rather than the model in general. Look at the engraving under magnification for its depth, the evenness of the cut and the crispness at the end of each line, and understand that some variation between examples is inherent to the technique rather than a defect. Then check for refinishing, which on a hand-engraved dial is not a repair at all but a replacement, since the work cannot be recut once the metal has been taken away. Confirm the machine guilloche on the subdials is still sharp at the crest of every line. Establish the number within the twenty and confirm it against the paperwork that came with the watch. On the case, check the 6N gold at the bezel and along the lug flanks for the softening that follows repeated polishing. Then give it a full wind of twenty turns and watch the seconds hand jump once a second without any hesitation. Have the carriage inspected by a specialist and establish the service history.
