Friday, June 28, 2019

French 3rd Hussars

I thought I would tackle the 3rd Hussars as my first French Hussar regiment for my Peninsular French army, for no other reason than I didn't feel like painting baby blue (sorry, sky blue!) uniforms just yet and I had seen reference of an officer in some very flashy red boots.
One of the participants on Benno's forum made mention that he thought that the Italeri Hussars were some of the best Napoleonic cavalry figures in 1/72 out there and I would tend to agree. They painted up beautifully and there was a great range of poses for both the riders and their horses. All are painted straight out of the box with no conversions necessary this time!

The 3rd Hussars were present at many of the Peninsular battles form 1808 and onwards and should get good play on my gaming board in their role as light cavalry. Here is a list of their regimental war record in the Peninsula.

1808: Tudela
1809: Calcabellos, Tanoris, Banos, Tamanies and Alba de Tormes
1810: Ciudad-Rodrigo, Almeida, Leria and Alcoluto
1811: Redhina and Fuentes-de-Onoro
1812: Arapiles
1813: Vittoria






9 comments:

  1. Agree with you on the quality of these figs. I've painted a few myself, and they are very nice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. beautiful, the "Argentinian gray" is one of the hardest to represent. figurines like the regiment are a good choice.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello
    As usual great painting and overall super blog.
    May I ask you which grey did you use for this particular regiment?
    Kind regards.
    CPN

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks all for taking a look, and the kind comments. As for my grey, CPN, I'm slowly switching over to Valeri paints but I hate to confess a lot that I use are still crappy dollar store paints!! So in this case, the grey was simply a mid-tone charcoal grey of indeterminate origin with some white mixed for highlights (I think). Probably a wash of black ink in there at some point as well

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Bill, thank you for your answer. This unit is also on my list one day and I am looking at adding a campaign dress flavour with coats rolled on the shoulder for some of them and an elite company with callbacks.
    https://www.napoleon-series.org/military/organization/c_frenchspan1.html
    https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/366973069633289420/
    Have a great weekend.
    CPN

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi CPN,
    I think the addition of the élite company in bearskins and troopers with the coats over their shoulders will both make nice additions to a regiment of hussars. The campaign look is something I've tried to achieve with some of my other units but this group looked so beautiful straight out of the box!
    I look forward to seeing your results some day.
    And that above should obviously have read "Vallejo paints"!

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Next time D'Hubert !"- The Duelists.

    ReplyDelete
  8. It was this 3rd Hussar Regiment that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote his Etienne Gerrard stories about. I loved them as a kid.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I didn't know that! I will have to look for those.

    ReplyDelete