"1859 Austrian Artillerymen" Topic

In this plate they seem to wear the white fatigue kittel with blanket instead of the well known brown faced red tunic..never heard about this campaign look of the KUK Art crews…previously i only saw cavalry, infantry and jaegers with that look……but this fact is confirmed in the text of this apparently well written article..i will certainly appreciate this possibility in order to use some spare minis for my Austrian gun crews..
any opinions?

You would think so – however, when I look at period plates by Escher and Strassgschwandtner all the gunners are in brown tunics faced red

link

That being said, those two worthy gentlemen almost certainly painted soldiers in the best possible circumstances, so in the field the look could have been quite different

Interestingly the jagers seem to be all in pike-grey and not in kittels.

Perhaps the whitecoats are just infantrymen lending the gunners some muscle?

Like Italwars, I had not previously seen a picture of Austrian gunners wearing the kittel in 1859, but I have often wondered about the apparent anomaly of the artillery not doing so, when all other branches did. That said, contemporary illustrations of the jäger wearing the kittel are also very rare. They are much more often shown in pike grey, as here.

The text of the article to which Italwars refers can be found here link . It is in Italian and is a reprint of an article that originally appeared in an Italian journal called "Panoplia". The illustration seems to represent one of the actions of Lt. Friedrich Kleinert, the commander of a half-battery of Austrian artilley (presumably the mounted officer with the telescope) at the battle of Magenta. Kleinert's courageous and effective handling of his guns covered the withdrawal of Austrian forces from the Ponte Nuovo to the west of Magenta into Magenta itself, in the face of heavy pressure from the French Imperial Guard. Kleinert was later made a Knight of the Maria Theresa Order.