lewenhaupt wrote:
Adding this picture of a Swedish Grenadier mitre. This one illustrates a mitre in Russian keep, taken during the GNW. So it gives evidence to the usage of soft miters, as opposed to the hard brass front plates.
Göte Göransson's illustrations are true classics! They are however not without issues and that particular picture got the colouring wrong.
The actual mitre look like this:
Göte Göransson however based his picture on this black and white photo from Erik Bellander's uniform book from 1973:
It was thus an easy mistake for Göte Göransson to think that the blue and red colouring was like this:
Göte Göransson was probably not the only one who was fooled by the black and white photo in Erik Bellander's book. In the Osprey book about the battle of Poltava, David Rickman illustrated the very same grenadier cap in this manner:
Again a great picture, but unfortunately not historically accurate. Unlike Göransson, Rickman seems to have based his version on the English caption to the photo in Bellander's book: "Blue cloth with red flaps and a gold monogram", and then made the conclusion that red and blue look the same in black and white.
Notice also that Rickman has fallen victim to the old misconception that Swedish grenadiers did not have turnbacks. He also made the odd decision to depict the grenadier with yellow facings even though red facings would be much more logical when the grenadier cap was blue and red.
Unfortunately more than one manufacturer of miniatures has put too much faith in the Osprey picture. Prince August for example released the following poses in October 2012:
Caps with red facings together with a coat with yellow facings is a little embarrassing but not a big problem since it is up to the customer to decide how he want to paint them. The absence of turnbacks however makes them unusable for anyone who wants historically correct miniatures.