French Military, Napoleonic era
The sword and bearskin suggest battlefield prestige, but this guardsman also points to an essential, less glamorous duty: protecting headquarters, movements and the person of the ruler.
A dark green coat, bright red accents and fur headgear give this mounted guardsman a distinctive silhouette. His uniform belongs to the cavalry corps whose dress Napoleon himself made familiar.
The forward-pointing sword and moving horse make Montbrun a forceful mounted portrait. His career supplies an equally direct story: a cavalryman who rose from the ranks to command a corps.
Murat’s spectacular clothing can overshadow the complicated career beneath it. This mounted portrait represents a cavalry leader who rose to a throne—and eventually tried to preserve that throne by breaking with Napoleon.
The green coat and raised sword suggest confidence. The date tells a harder story: in 1814, Napoleon’s army was defending France after the losses of Russia and Germany.
The camel changes everything: height, balance and the shape of the equipment. Del Prado’s Captain François is a reminder that the French expedition to Egypt required more than transferring European cavalry habits to a different landscape.
The leather jacket gives this captain a very different appearance from a marching infantryman. It also opens a revealing question about French armour in 1940: how much work could one commander be expected to do inside a tank?
The red beret and camouflage are familiar, but the year is easy to overlook. This Del Prado colonial paratrooper belongs to 1952, when the experience of an air-supplied position at Na San still lay ahead of the catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu.
The blue jacket and pale trousers are the first clues: this is an air-force officer, not a generic Free French army commander. His subject connects the collection to the French squadrons that fought within a much larger Allied air organisation.
At a crossroads in Belgium, the convoy disappeared. Harry Leigh-Dugmore had been told to follow the vehicle ahead; when the military police waved him on, there was nothing to follow. He was twenty, a lance-corporal, and suddenly responsible for eight other men, a truck and a Bren carrier. The road to Dunkirk began, for his small party, with the discovery that nobody knew where to go.
