BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
Jaeger-LeCoultre’s been on a roll in the past couple of years. As I’ve mentioned before, the brand’s offerings from around five years ago seemed somewhat uninteresting compared to their “wild” days from the nineties to the late teens. I’m not sure what it was about their watches, but they lacked the pizazz they’ve been renowned for in the past. Thankfully, those days are behind us, and for the past couple of years or so, they’ve been pushing the boat out by re-imagining their current lineup (and making new designs too, of course). For late 2025, Jaeger-LeCoultre has come out swinging with a re-imagining of the Master Grande Tradition Calibre 948, let’s take a closer look.
The Master Grande Tradition Calibre 948 Q52824E2 is not a watch for everyone. I know that fact might be astonishing to some, but I’m just putting it out there now, as we do occasionally get some folks outraged that watches like these exist and don’t offer the same value for money as their [insert more affordable brand here – there are a lot of those this time]. It’s a limited edition run of 20 watches set within an 18k pink gold case produced by the brand’s skunkworks, which they call the Métiers Rares™ atelier.
The watch’s dial is a work of art represented by enamel. It’s a world timer, meaning that you can work out the current time in all of the 24 timezones this watch displays, this also explains the world map present on the dial. Note that timezones which are between the hours of the day but are still significant, like New Delhi in India, are not displayed here. All of the timezones are displayed on a blue backdrop around the edge of the dial, and around those timezones is an elegantly grained laser-engraved ring showing the hours in Arabics with the Jaeger-LeCoultre logo present too. In the middle of the dial is the map display. It’s a little hard to see in the press photos, but the map display is slightly domed and the colour comes from the nine layers of enamel, with different enamel colours being used to represent the various landscapes of the continents. Below that is the blue dial plate, which starts with a wavy guilloché pattern being cut, then a layer of varnish and a layer of that blue colour are added. Then, 15 layers of lacquer are applied to give it a rich and vibrant appearance. You can start to see why they aren’t making many of these.
Then we move to the mechanics. As well as the world time function, which is controlled through the crown, there’s also the floating “Universal tourbillon” on the dial which completes one (anti-clockwise) rotation of the dial every 24 hours. As far as I can tell from what Jaeger-LeCoultre has said in its press release, the act of the tourbillon rotating on its axis and also rotating the dial is what makes this a “Universal tourbillon”, if anyone from Jaeger-LeCoultre wants to get in touch and correct me or add more details, please do.
Jaeger-LeCoultre seems to have forgotten to include any photos of the caseback of this watch in their press release, I’m not sure why. There is a still image I can look at from one of their marketing videos where we can see through the open caseback, a skeletonised gold rotor is adorned with the ‘JL’ logo and a mix of polished and grained surfaces. That rotor sits above a plate which has been engraved with another view of the world as seen from the Northern hemisphere, reflecting the map on the dial. Despite lacking traditional finishes like stripes or waves, the map view looks fantastic. As for the specs, the watch has a 48-hour power reserve and the escapement beats at 4Hz.
To make room for all of the components necessary to move the dial and the flying tourbillon and so on, and to also make all of that legible, the watch is quite big, measuring 43.00mm x 14.13mm. It’s an elegant case, though, I really like the mixture of finishes they’ve used and the subtle cut into the sides of the case, which gives it a modern sense of depth. It’s 50m water resistant, however, meaning that in true Jaeger-LeCoultre fashion, they’ve thought about how one might reasonably wear this kind of watch, which would occasionally include exposure to water via hand washing or some such. It does still have a dark blue alligator leather strap (with a folding buckle), so it’s best not to dunk this if you can avoid it. As I mentioned, they’re only making 20 of these, and at a price of just above EUR300,000, the chances of them being worn during water-based activities seem few.
