French Infantry of 1845: Old 40mm Flats

 

I'd mentioned in the previous post that this one would cover Spenkuch.  And so I'd intended, only to find the in-progress photo of the castings I'd modified to be unacceptably blurry upon uploading. More about those soon, but in the meantime, here's an interesting small group of antique 40mm flats which I found on the Berliner Zinnfiguren Flohmarkt.

BZ attributed the editor as Ramm of Lüneburg.  This venerable 19th firm seems to have gone under ca. 1904 with the death of Johan Friedrich Heinrich Ramm. While stylistically they seem a bit different than most of the Ramm offerings, there's no reason firm reason to doubt it. 

The section about Ramm on the Zinnfiguren-Bleifiguren site offers this critique: "Alle diese Typen sind ziemlich ungeschickt in der Stellung und zum Teil auch im anatomischen Bau", which Google translates as "All these guys are pretty awkward in the position and to some extent in the anatomical structure."  That nicely sums it up, although I must say these particular castings look good to my eyes.  At a casual glance they appear a bit ungainly and long-waisted, but upon closer examination I think it's due to the long frock coats and quite baggy trousers.

How to paint them ?  One guy had no shako decoration, so why not French infantry ca.1850, he could be a center company figure and then of course we must have voltigeurs and grenadiers to balance it out.  Thanks to Grosser-Generalstab.de the Humbert & Lienhart plates come in handy.

And the painted result:

Not bad. The "eyes right" pose is always a nuisance with flats because painting the faces frontally is harder than the standard profile. I'm afraid I made a mediocre job of the faces here but they're at least tolerable, and if I can copy the figures successfully, I'm sure to pull off at least a few good ones within a battalion.  Other than that, I think they're well-posed and appealing once the paint goes on.  No copyright issues in play so I've reserved the three castings shown above to try making molds of.