Kaiserjäger museum Innsbruck

Tonight I was busy sorting photographies from my last trip to Innsbruck into my archive.

In Innsbruck you have the battlefield of Mount Isel on which is the museum of the Austrian
Kaiserjäger. In fact Tiroleans of course:-))

It is a great little museum which covers the history of the regiment from it's foundation 1815 to 1918, especially all the wars in Italy in the 19th century and WW1

They have some very nice figure dioramas, made of selfmade figures in around 30mm scale.


This one here is from the lesser known 1878 campaign in Bosnia

Here a 1848 campaign in Italy

For all of you planing to go to Austria the town of Innsbruck is my tip as beside the museum here there is the panorama painting of the 3rd battle of Berg Isel, Ambrass castle with a nice museum and the Hofburg with another historical museum. Beside this they have great Wiener Schnitzel!!!

The 1870 HAT masters arrived

Hi guys,

last week I got the parcel from HAT with the great French infantry masters. These guys will go to the Schillings for casting them in two weeks when we meet each other on the show in Mainz.

These figures are one of the best detailed I have seen so far in this range. Thanks to the help of some of you I was able to pay these masters cash and now I go for the Bavarian set.

Everybody who wants to help here is invited to do this and take part in the project.

Marattha regulars for Assaye

It was a real challenge to research how the regular Sepoys of Scindia in the war of 1803/05 (or earlier) looked like.

Most modern sources show them in simple peasents dress of white with a turban like at this famous painting of David Rowlans, showing the charge of the 19th dragoons

But this is far from the truce. No Indian princes had regular troops before the French breakdown in India after the fall of Pondicherry in the 1780ies. A lot of French officers lost their job and not being interested to go back to France they decided to stay in India and offered their service to some Indian princes. One of the most favourite of them was De Boigne.  See his biography at Wikipedia . He was the first to organise regular Sepoys in his masters service.  All the old texts write about the organisation, that they looked similar to French and British Sepoys and the battles they fought.

Well the French looked like this in the second half of the 18th century.

I had the good luck that my friend Alfred had an old catalogue from a special exhibition about De Boigne. Between all the stuff were some old paintings of how Sepoys from an Indian prince looked like. Most tried to copy the British (as surprising to me was De Boigne's uniform on the Wikipedia-link too).

For example here a painting from the ASKB collection. There are more which I wasn't able to find at the moment and I am too lazy to go upstairs and scan the ones from my archive:-))

But we know that these uniforms are all from around 1805 to 1815 onwards after the British were well established in India. But how looked the uniform of a Sepoy in the late 1780ies to 1805.
Here is a scan in a high resolution from Alfred's catalogue, painted by an Indian of this period.

So I decided to want this uniform for my own Sepoys at Assaye. And here are the results, sculpted by Ingo. More poses will hopefully follow

We know that Scindia's Sepoys had a white uniform, so I simply painted them this style. Other variations of blue, green and yellow are also known.

These figures are now for sale - just in case someone is interested in them too:-))

Interesting homepage for 1870

Just accidently I found this homepage. Some interesting original-photos like these here

Well I hope to get you more interested in this subject because I already got the first bunch of HAT 1870 masters and want to produce them soon. And I am working on an internetshop which I hope I can open soon.

Napoleonic music bands

For a Napoleonic diorama I always need a lot of fighting figures. But on the other hand most troops stood around waiting or marching on the field.

HAT or Strelets made some marching sets in the meantime and especially the HAT marching Prussians or the upcomming French. As for the Strelets marching French, well..... But on the other hand Strelets mad nice marching and standing Romans and early medievals.

But there are a lot of other things we need on a diorama. For example doctors and medicals (HAT made great wagons there).

One things that beside Hitty no plastic manufactor ever tried to make napoleonic musicians.

In the old days Minifigs took this challenge. Sadly not with their S-range figures which are compatible with 1/72, but with the later PB range which has the same height but are more clumbsy.
But as no other bands are available, I got some from my friend Old John for my collection.

See here some of John's own collection which are great.

The Carabinier band is my favourite. And I have a British band too from this range.

The uniforms of musicians are very colourful and always give a change of colour in a unit. See here some uniform-examples

A Roman harbour and the Roman navy

Another great diorama from Stephan Berry, this time a litlle naval. I am always impressed by dioramas with water. One of my ideas was to creat a sea-battle of the Punic wars with our troops from Pyrrhus and the Carthagians we already have painted. We have over 20 of the Zvezda ships too, but more than half of them still need to be build. And this is a challenge...

Ok, but comming from me and my humble mass-dioramas to a piece of art:-)

And here some photos from my last visit to the Roman naval museum in Mainz

 From the tombstone of a sailor

 ok this here blurred but I think still interesting

 This one is scale 1:1 was impressing!!

Borodino - last steps

The Rajevsky-redoubt is completet and so far it seems we have all the 800 Saxons painted.
As for the Russian infantry around 1500 I already glued on the bases in the meantime and now our
biggest problem - as always - are dead and wounded soldiers to put in front of the redoubt. I fear we won't have enough to show how it really looked like.