Eugene Beauharnais

Following a trawl through my stash of figures, I came across this unfinished piece after about 15 years ago. It was a poor conversion of a Historex kit. What drew me to try this conversion then was the double saddle cloth apparently used by EB when he was acting as commander of the Chasseurs au Cheval Guard. The double saddle was created by cutting up the lower saddle and sticking parts of it to the pantherskin saddle. However, the horse conversion and pose with the rear legs kicking out then was unsatisfactory and I abandoned the piece then.

Recently, I did a different conversion of the horse and I liked the pose (see my recent post under Napoleonic Horse). This showed a frisky animal and I decided to carry on with the conversion. The saddlecloth was fitted to the horse. Substantial parts of the upper part of the horse had to be removed to accommodate the saddle. The mane sculpted originally in Duro green putty, was removed and a new mane was resculpted in A&B putty.

The original stiff Historex figure was also disappointing. I realised that parts of the original kit had to be substantially altered. Hence the legs and boots were substantially bulked up with putty. Quite a bit of putty was added and the figure was gently pressed onto the saddle cloth to test for fit.

I also substituted my own metal cast sculpted hussar torso for the original Historex torso. The latter seems to lack definition. I converted the stiff hussar pose to be more lively as he tries to balance himself on the frisky horse. Note the off-centre pose. The left rear hoof had broken off and was fixed back into position in the last photo. However, this changed the alignment of the horse, causing the figure to appear to be sitting straight up when I had wanted a forward leaning position.