"Empress Dragoons: help!" Topic

So I have acquired a small stash of old Hinchliffe 25mm figures, many familiar, but others not. They include an officer and a couple of troopers of the Empress Dragoons.

The Cent Jours site and Uniforms of Waterloo show these guys with green collars and red piping and turnbacks. Uniforms of the Retreat from Moscow and Uniforms of the Peninsular War does not show them at all. Other references say they wore the Grenadier a Cheval uniform except with green where the Grenadiers had blue.

Googling for images of them, a lot of hits are painted miniatures. There are lots of officers, but very few troopers, and I'm not sure the troopers are right. I have read that the shabraque trim and cords etc should be aurore. Many I see online have these in yellow. The unit also appears to wear fringeless epaulettes; what colour are these? And for officers, did they have any aurore, or was it all gold? Were the red turnbacks actually aurore as well? Or was aurore used for troopers' lace, trim, anywhere an officer would have gold?

As a teaser out of our last (4th) volume about the uniforms at Waterloo to be published in may 2022 (I'll announce them here) I put my text about the Empress dragoons:

The Empress' Dragoons were also formed from an existing body of troops. This was because the old Guards Dragoon Regiment continued as the Corps royal des Dragons de France in 1814 after Napoleon's abdication. The decree of April 8, 1815, then led to its being renamed to the old designation.
The uniform consisted of the old familiar coat with brass buttons, white lapels, green collar, red turnbacks, and straight red cuffs with white cuff flaps. The turn- backs had orange grenades. There was an orange contra-epaulet without fringe on both shoulders, with additional retaining cords on the right shoulder. The gray cloth pants were tucked into heavy cavalry boots. The old helmet with black horsehair tail and red feather plume served as headgear. Whether the plume was also worn on the campaign cannot be proven. The dragoon's straight sabre was attached to the white waist belt, which was closed with a brass buckle. The black cartridge pouch hung from the white leather bandolier. The shabraque, pistol holster covers and valise were green with orange trim. There was an orange crown in the back corners of the shabraque.
What was special about the uniform of the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) was that the majority of them went on the campaign with the single-breasted surtout. This had green cuffs without flaps, only the turnbacks remained red. In addition, they had the rank insignia and scarlet-gold retaining cords. For the officers' and buglers' uniforms, please refer to the captions in the plates.

Our texts are a conclusion with the help of state-of-the-art works like Dawson and Juhel.

So perhaps the book covering the French army could be a help for you.

Greetings from Berlin
Markus Stein

"Aurore" is something between orange and pink. See for instance here: link

Here is more information about the Guard-Dragoons: link

Hope this helps !

Thanks very much, both.

Paul Dawson's latest research suggests that aurore is 'a vivid shade of dark orange', and he provides a photo of an 1823 cloth sample to prove it. It looks like a browner version of orange or scarlet.

I've used a red/orange and added either white or a pale flesh color to it. especially if painting 15mm/18mm figures.

This comes around every so often. Some photos of actual uniforms posted here support the idea that Vallejo German Orange is a good match for aurore. A "vivid shade of dark orange" may be true for 1823 and it may be true for fabric that has not yet been exposed to the elements but based on the photos we've all seen here, it seems more pinky orange than 'vivid' and 'dark'. I'm not arguing the point, just raising the old issue of colour matching being an imperfect science. Also, given that there is orange and tangerine (capucin) to consider, going for "a vivid shade of dark orange" doesn't leave much room for them.

Personally I decided to stick with (all Vallejo) German orange for aurore, orange red for capucin (after much agonising over how yellow it would fade to, based on the range of shades in various sources kindly posted here) and light orange over orange red for orange (which I haven't needed to use yet.

Cheers
John

I published some colour patterns (e.g. The stated 1823 pattern) in our Board at link

Greetings from Berlin
Markus Stein

I got a "Sorry, you are not authorized to view this page. For help, contact the Sieten administrator" message, even after I signed up. Maybe I need to wait a while.

Cheers,
John

Sorry – I forgot that you should have been a validated user (I just did it for you) to see all annexes.

But I extracted them in order to make them available for the TMP users, too. So you may see:

1) samples of cloth from 1823 (photographed by our friend Yves Martin) => PDF link

2) colors given in a small booklet of Paul Dawson => PDF link

3) image of some cloth provided to me by Oliver Schmidt =>

I hope that may clarify the question of the color "Aurore" a bit, particularly in contrast to the more red colors of the French army … but I also follow the idea that there hadn't been that exact color, as these were mixed in different manufacturing companies and we may also consider the bleaching of cloth while wearing it.

Greetings from Berlin
Markus Stein

Thanks Markus. What are the other three volumes on Waterloo uniforms?

Remarkable how dark the blues and greens are in the Paul Dawson pdf. I am guessing they were dyed darker so that they'd fade to something close to the correct intended shade.

I also note that 'chamois' – as in voltigeur collar chamois – is actually orange. Does anyone here use orange when painting voltigeurs?

@Cuirassier: here you've a link to all volumes edited by Zeughausverlag in Berlin – link

The French one (4th volume) will be available in May/June 2022, and surely in a German and English version.

Greetings
Markus Stein

Thanks Markus,
I too am surprised by the darkness of the blue, especially the sky blue, which seems to have omitted the word 'night', as in night sky blue! As 4th Cuirassier notes, they would have expected fading . . .

Cheers,
John

It's not just that the Greens and Blues are so dark, in the second PDF posted by NapStein on 27th April they're virtually indistinguishable. Interesting that the Green for line Dragoons is the same as for line Chasseurs a Cheval and Lancers, rather than being significantly lighter as often seen in painted figures. And at least Trumpeters of the Garde Horse Artillery and Chasseurs a Cheval won't put me in mind of icing on a cake when painted in these darker colours

@ Robert

It's not just that the Greens and Blues are so dark, in the second PDF posted by NapStein on 27th April they're virtually indistinguishable.

You're not wrong. They may have diverged over time – IIRC green was made by dyeing fabric blue then dyeing the result yellow. Depending on which faded first, a green uniform would presumably have turned either bluer or greener.

Interesting that the Green for line Dragoons is the same as for line Chasseurs a Cheval and Lancers

In my simple minded way I have always understood green to be the coat colour of French line cavalry in the same way that blue was the coat colour of French line infantry. So the same single shade of green, or blue, across all of them.

I reckon the reason some assume otherwise is Humbrol, who long ago made a colour they called "Dragoon Green", which implies this was unique to dragoons. If they'd called it "French Line Cavalry Green", all would have been clear. And they'd probably have sold more paint.

Paul Dawson does make the point that Guard uniforms were dyed differently. I forget the exact terms but you can either dye the piece, dye the bolt of cloth from which you tailor the piece, or dye the threads before you weave it into the bolt of cloth. Guard uniforms were dyed in the thread, line in the bolt of cloth, using the same spec of dye but obtaining hence slightly different results.

So if you want guardsmen to stand out from the rest you could reasonably paint them different shades to reflect the different process. I'd be sorely tempted to paint my Empress Dragoons a darker green than line dragoons. I'm thinking they should all be a lot darker than is usually seen anyway.

Agree with virtually everything you've written, and do remember the business about various methods of dyeing (think I read it in connection with the re-styling of uniforms captured from enemies). However; in pointing out that the little squat tin in question was not "Dragoon Green" but "French Dragoon Green" I'm not being irritatingly nit-picking; I'm just reminded that they also sent me the wrong way with their "French Artillery Green" (as has been mentioned previously in the Napoleonic Discussion board, "Gros Vert" paint was mixed from thirty parts yellow ochre to one part black). With regard to green among my own Napoleonic Cavalry,* fortunately most of those painted are actually Chasseurs a Cheval, in the dark green I prefer, so they, like a unit of Lancers in the same shade, stay as they are, the 7th Hussars (and Lasalle) look fine as they are in a slightly lighter green, but there are two regiments of Dragoons which, I sensibly decide, must have been on a long campaign in a sunny land.

Digressions and joking aside, I found this a most useful thread, too, and not for the first time am grateful for the research and knowledge of others.

* French. Years ago I read that the green of the Russian Army was so dark that it appeared black at a distance (I suspect that everyone other than Cuirassiers would appear black at a distance). I thought about this for nearly a minute before deciding that my Russian Dragoons looked very well as they were. And are.

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@ Robert

Thanks. I find this whole subject most interesting. What colour white was is a favourite. White shirts were then made by soaking the fabric in sheep's milk and exposing it to sunshine for about 6 seeks. The lactic acid bleaches out the colour, apparently. From about 1750, there began the use of what was then called "oil of vitriol", or as we would say, sulfuric acid. A weak solution of this bleached shirts properly white-white, as opposed to grey-white or parchment-white. It was expensive and probably not widespread in our era. White Austrian coats could be pipeclayed to make them white-white rather than parchment-white.

White crossbelts were made to look whiter by the addition of copper sulphate crystals in the pipeclay, which also makes belts look shiny.

ISTR that there were French (and Russian) hussars who wore green, but as part of a hussar rig, with a red pelisse or whatever. I think there has to be room to wonder if this was necessarily the same shade as the line cavalry's or the line infantry's green in either case. I think you could legitimately pick your shade because this is not a standard colour. Of course if they had bolts of ready-dyed green to hand to make other uniforms, I bet they'd have used it.

The bit of re-enactment I'd like to see would be somebody remanufacturing these materials and dyes to the original specs to see what actually happens to them. I sort of assume they fade as you've described your dragoons. I will need some Russians one day so it sounds like Vallejo Black Green might the way to go.

Most interesting re. the techniques (I'd a vague recollection of soaking materials in various liquids, variously prepared or indeed collected, and certainly "bleaching greens" – i.e. flat areas of grassland, often alongside rivers &c – but not the Copper Sulphate detail). Never mind Green for Russian Hussars (I tend to mix colours, and will use a dullish, but not dark, green for, from memory, the Pavlogradski Hussars), what about "Raspberry" & "Turquoise"?! Hard to beat the Austrians for precision of colour-names, though; "pike grey" literally fades away by comparison with something like "parrot green". Good Luck with the Dragons de l'Imperatrice.

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