Grand Complications

Unlike the Calatrava, the Nautilus or the Aquanaut, Grand Complications was not born as a single model with its own launch date, but as a commercial category that gathers, under a single catalogue heading, all Patek Philippe references that integrate one or more "great complications": perpetual calendar, rattrapante (split-seconds) chronograph, minute repeater, tourbillon and astronomical complications such as moon phases or starry-sky charts. It is the showcase in which the brand demonstrates, reference after reference, the technical primacy it has built over nearly two centuries of patents: more than a hundred filed over the course of its history, starting with the perpetual calendar for pocket watches introduced as early as 1889.

The most celebrated chapter of this story, however, concerns a piece no longer in production: the Henry Graves Supercomplication, a pocket watch with 24 complications commissioned in 1925 by New York banker Henry Graves Jr. and completed in 1933, after years of development, to satisfy his rivalry with another collector, James Ward Packard. Remaining for 56 years the most complicated mechanical watch ever built in the world, the record passed only in 1989 to the Calibre 89, made by the same brand to celebrate its 150th anniversary with 33 complications. Graves's Supercomplication, sold in 1999 for 11 million dollars and later resold by Sotheby's in Geneva in 2014 for 24 million dollars, remains one of the three or four most celebrated watches ever made, often described by industry experts themselves as "the Mona Lisa of watchmaking".

In the current catalogue the Grand Complications family includes, among others, the Ref. 5270 (perpetual calendar with chronograph), the Ref. 5374 (minute repeater with perpetual calendar) and the extraordinary Sky Moon Tourbillon Ref. 5002/6002, the only double-case, double-dial wristwatch ever series-produced by the brand, with twelve complications including a tourbillon, a minute repeater and a map of the night sky visible above Geneva — produced in just a few examples a year. The absolute pinnacle, however, remains the Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300, presented in 2014 for the brand's 175th anniversary: twenty functions distributed over two dials (front and back, accessed by rotating the case), including a minute-repeater chime, a perpetual calendar with a "retractable" display that can be activated on command, and a dual time zone. The unique steel example Ref. 6300A-010, made for the Only Watch charity auction in November 2019, sold for 31 million Swiss francs, the highest price ever paid at auction for a wristwatch.