Saturday, December 27, 2008

A Dearth of Horseflesh?


A quick question for my learned colleagues.

Aside from Front Rank and some rather dire looking figures from The Foundry, does anyone know of a -good- range of 18th C. French cavalry out there? Good as in variety and quality.

I know the Staddens are popular with a lot of Lace War aficionado's- and they do have their appeal- but they are somewhat generic, and do not really suit either my painting style or the other miniatures in my collection, the cavalry being all Front Rank.

My understanding is that Minden Miniatures are supposed to be working on cavalry next year, but I've no idea yet how extensive the range will be for the French.

For some reason, a number of manufacturers who have done French infantry do not seem to have tackled the cavalry (yes, you, Crusader!).

4 comments:

Der Alte Fritz said...

The RSM figures should match up well with the Minden range. I don't know what brands of figures you are using so that makes it hard to make a recommendation. More information please?

Robert said...

Thanks Bill, and good point! I've edited the post.

Most of my French are Front Rank. I have two battalions of Minden Miniatures, but the rest of the collection- including all the cavalry- are Front Rank.

How well would the RSM miniatures stack up against them? I'm thonking they may be pretty small

I didn't even know that the RSM line was still available. I had quite a lot of these back in the 1980's but the source dried up, and I sold them all off as I was able to get Front Rank a lot more easily.

Bluebear Jeff said...

Frank has been building his Minden Miniatures line for four nations:

Prussian & Austrian
British & French

I separated them because he seems to do the first set of two first, then the second set.

Whether that will be his pattern with the cavalry, I don't know.

You can see the greens for his "Mounted Colonels" by checking the Archives for September, 2008 for his blog:

http://mindenminis.blogspot.com/

Click on the photos to get a larger image. This should let you know if you like the style.


-- Jeff

Robert said...

Thanks for the link, Jeff.

The colonel looks good, and that is a very nice paint job by Ioannis!

I should consider ordering one along with another battalion of French to see how it compares.