F.P. Journe Simplicity & Dufourmania

Greetings to all!  First of all, thanks to all of you here who make the PuristS community so great -- it has been a tremendous pleasure to read your posts, interact online, and meet many of the members of this forum over the past several years.

Thanks also for sharing my excitement at the impending arrival of my Dufour Simplicity -- it certainly puts the cherry on top of the set of watches I have had the great good fortune to collect, and at least as far as I am concerned is one of the great classics.  A close friend of mine has told me that he considers the Simplicity and the VH Antiqua to be the two most important independent watches -- I'll leave it to others to debate that, but it feels good to have both of those pieces, as well as my beloved Observatoire, to treasure.

In true NorCal style, a group of friends gathered for lunch to celebrate the arrival of the Simplicity.  One member of the group was unable to attend, but the rest were on hand.  So -- five guys went into a dining room...

 No messing around!  Without delay, the first order of business was to get the Simplicity out of its travel case.  Great to be able to do this in the presence of good friends:

I'm guessing you haven't noticed this over the years, but I am a "no" when it comes to taking (and posting) pictures of food.  That said, I could not resist in this case, as two of our hardy band went for the Kobe beef burger topped with a hangar steak.  The burger is hidden under the steak in this view, but believe me, it's there...

In between bites, there was enough time for a quick initial wrist shot.  At 37mm, this watch looks great on the wrist -- I'm guessing that part of this is the fairly straight lugs that take the strap out to the sides

Oh, did I mention that the other attendees brought their Dufour watches as well?  To get started, here are the three lacquer dial watches, in PT, RG, and WG respectively (with apologies for the restaurant lighting glare and non-synchronized times)

And, a little later on, the full set -- with the WG Duality and two WG Simplicities on the left, followed by the RG and PT watches and finally the WG with anthracite guilloche dial.  In this mix, we had all 3 dial types in WG cases, and all case types with the lacquer dial -- not to mention that tasty piece on the left end.   All of the Simplicities at 37mm, with the Duality at 34mm.

More on all of those pieces shortly, but my first happy duty upon arriving home was to take some shots of my Simplicity in the light tent:

I'm really getting to like the elegance of the lacquer dial.  Of course, the grass is always greener so at some point I may want to add the silver guilloche with baton hands as a back-up, but for now this will do just fine.  In any case (no pun intended...), most of my gazing time will likely be spent looking at that fantastically finished movement:

For a limited production watch, the Simplicity has been the subject of a relatively large number of really outstanding photo-essays -- so I don't think I've added much (if anything) here to the inventory of Simplicity movement shots.  The good news is that I can keep trying!

Enough about me -- let's go back to my buddies' pieces.  First, the lovely PT piece -- to my eye the printing on this dial is a little more fine than on the RG and WG pieces:

WG with anthracite guilloche dial.  Looks great in indirect light -- but is a bugger to photgraph

The RG watch, freshly serviced by Philippe and with a new lacquer dial (replacing the anthracite one).  Dufour's RG is a fairly delicate hue that really complements the subtle design of the watch -- I have to say that I like this version the best:

WG with silver guilloche dial -- as noted above, a look that I really like (love that wavy gravy guilloche!) and may have to go for at some point

Finally, the Duality -- real royalty, also in WG with a silvered dial.  Very difficult to capture the correct color of this dial in photos -- it's actually more silver than it appears here

I didn't take photos of all of the Simplicity movements, but had to take some of the Duality!  Here's one -- I'll post more separately:

And, last but not least a couple of group shots.  You can imagine the pleasure it brought me to see all of these pieces in one place and to have the chance to photograph them -- complete sensory overload

Two things to note in this final shot: my watch (top center) had started running, so the time doesn't match -- more importantly, despite the reflection you will be able to see a better rendering of the Duality dial color in this shot

That's it!  I hope that you enjoyed, and will look forward to many more happy interactions with all of my PuristS friends.

All the best,

Gary G