Dutch Horse Artillery

To complete the Dutch brigade at Talavera I needed a battery of Dutch horse artillery, and that involved a bit of conversion work as well. If you would like to see the blogs documenting the building of the Dutch infantry they can be found here:

https://tinywarsplayedindoors.blogspot.com/2023/02/dutch-12nd-infantry-regiment.html

https://tinywarsplayedindoors.blogspot.com/2023/02/dutch-24th-infantry-battalion.html

The Dutch horse artillery wore hussar style uniforms, as can be seen here in this plate:

Artilleryman Horse Artillery as he would have appeared in Hamburg 1807-1808, from the uniform plates by the Suhr Brothers

I had a set of Italeri French Guard artillery that I wasn't likely to use anytime soon, and these provided an excellent base for conversions. They only required a head swap from bearskins to shako, with the addition of tall plumes on some of the shakos that lacked them. The only problem was that there were only five artillerymen in the set, so to get up to my usual three (or at times four) I added another Italeri figure from the French command set, an aide de campe in hussar uniform who also required a head swap.  This figure  had the arm angle changed and the other hand that was grasping a document swapped for a slow match I constructed for the cannon.

Again, here is one of my poor WIP pictures, but it gives the idea.

The third figure from the left is the Italeri ADC conversion. I'm not certain that the Dutch artillery would have had the hussar pelisse - probably not - but this figure wears one.

So here are the final results. I wasn't sure of the cannon colour but didn't have extras anyway so I've simply borrowed a couple of French cannon to place on the stand.

I hope you enjoy them!

And a final shot of the entire brigade, both Dutch infantry battalions and the horse battery.