Prince August French Artillery - Part 4 - Finally ready

The first thing we notice when we see the 54mm artillery moulds from Prince August is that the soldiers are wearing a headgear that we don't expect.  In fact, the uniform regulations of the French army changed every few years at that time and the Prince August moulds show us figures with a hat that the artillerymen (and a lot of the other troops) wore in the first years of the 19th century. According to Knötel the shako was introduced in 1810 for the french artillery. 

But that's not a problem, because the heads are loose and interchangeable. If you want to represent the later period or the guard artillery, you will find the heads for them in the moulds of the Imperial Guard and the Line Infantry of the same series.

But since this headgear was widely used in the period, it is good that we can make them. One can use them with a little adaptation and some parts from other moulds for completely different regiments or nations. In general, you should look very carefully at the parts in this mould series: there are numerous possibilities for modifications and combinations.

The Uniform

I had a problem there. While the pictures of the french artillerymen of that time are roughly all very similar, they are often very different in the details. To make it harder, many artists concentrated more on the later years of the Napoleonic Empire, the earlier years are often missed out.

This illustration (from the Vinkhuizen collection) shows a naval artilleryman from 1796. Looks very similar to our figures. But in the time of the Empire the cockade on the hat had changed - the revolution was over. And the soldier in this picture wears the gaiters like the light infantry. Or specific short ones for the Navy where heavy boots and long gaiters would have been not so useful or needed. But what you can see: our moulds here can also produce figures from the time of the revolution.

And then I found this detail. It explicitly shows the skirt and hat of the uniform in 1806. What caught my eye were the blue shoulder straps, which I found in other depictions always in red. So I'll stick with red. That simply looks better. But it could be wrong, who knows.

It took me a very long time to finish this group. Half-finished figures normally do not stand around for so long on my painting table. But I was busy elsewhere and as you can read on my other blog, my health was also an issue. But now it's done and I am back in the saddle again.

I ended up with 4 cannons, a 4-man crew per cannon and 2 officers. I resisted the temptation to do each of the 6 different figures as a crew for each cannon. That would have been too much. Given my space and the gaming table size, I couldn't not use much more. But if some should be needed later: the moulds are still there.

This was the last group of figures that needed to be painted. The cannons were ready many weeks ago, but unfortunately I missed posting something or even just photographing them. Therefore, unfortunately, we only see the end result here.