A bit of a mixture this week - Spanish infantry, British Cavalry and a unit that I have wanted to do for nearly 20 years.
These took some work to gather information on. I had seen an entry for Provincial Grenadier Regiments / Battalions in a few of the early OOBs. While all Spanish Infantry Regiments had Grenadier companies (which on occasion seem to have been detached and converged), these were something different. There were some references in books and online, although they were quite brief and did not provide much uniform information. Specifically I was looking to see what colours they would have had for their facings and hence their 'flame' bearskin bags. I had read a brief reference to red facings - but still believed that would have been for just one province. Then I read elsewhere that as they had been detached from the Provincial Infantry Regiments, their uniforms were simpler and all had red facings. Searching also took me to this blog where I found all the satisfaction I needed. So I was off... and four battalions emerged after a day's work.
I know zooming small figures is not a good idea - but I spent over an hour on these flames and I wanted a record of it. Unfortunately it is still quite hot here in Sydney so I needed to thin the white quite a bit to keep it mobile enough - hence it is quite faint.
Then a rinse and repeat from an earlier post - four more battalions of later Spanish Line Infantry with the dark blue British supplied uniform.
Next up are some British Cavalry with their uniforms for the Peninsular. While I will share British line infantry between my Peninsular and 100 Day campaigns with a mixture of stovepipe and Belgic shakos in both, the cavalry did look noticeably different with bicornes and Tarleton helmets - so I decided to do both early and late uniforms. Here are the 'heavies' - 3rd Royal Dragoons and the 1st and 4th Dragoons with their bicornes.
They are followed by the 14th and 16th Light Dragoons with their tarleton helmets.
And finally a unit that I have wanted to do for close to 20 years since I saw it in 28mm and was struck by how different it looked. I later read about it in Guy Dempsey's excellent book Napoleon's Mercenaries. I will be honest though - it's place in this week's painting was pure greediness. I looked at how many points I was going to get and thought it would be nice to get over 200 in at least one week of the challenge - so I looked in the boxes for a single battalion and this popped up pretty quickly.
They were called the "Canaries" in reference to their yellow coat colour and with that colour on a French cut uniform they could only be the Bataillon du Prince de Neufchatel. They were absolutely in the Peninsular but are unlikely to appear on any of the OOBs for actual battles that I will fight. They spent most of their time in the North of Spain in combat against guerrillas. However, they were present at Wagram in 1809 (where it is believed they played a small part), in Russia at the Battle of Krasnoi and also in action on the last day of the Battle of Leipzig. So hopefully they will get into action on my table in an historical refight at some stage.
Points
Four btns of Provincial Grenadiers each of 24 figures @ 0.5 pts per fig = 48 pts
Four btns of Spanish Line Infantry each of 24 figures @ 0.5 pts per fig = 48 pts
Two regts of British Heavy Dragoons each of 20 figure @ 1 pt per fig - 40 pts
Three regts of British Light Dragoons each of 20 figure @ 1 pt per fig - 60 pts
Bataillon du Prince de Neufchatel of 36 figures @ 0.5 pt per fig - 18 pts
Total = 214 points
From Millsy:
Thanks for taking the time to detail the background for the provincial grenadiers Richard, it was absolutely fascinating and I promptly followed that link and kept reading. I'm unsurprised about where you found the info, that blog is a treasure trove of cool stuff.
I'm still processing the fact you bothered to paint ALL the grenadier bearskin bags. 96 of them! I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or organisation some sort of intervention. Either way it's worth another 10 points for the effort.
Another massive pile of wee men done and your tally boosted by another 224 points. Great work mate.
Cheers,
Millsy
