Mid War Spanish Additions (cont.6) - Grenaderos de la Isla de Canaria

The 1810-11 uniform details for this unit were taken from the watercolour by Antonio Pareira Pacheco. 

The Osprey (Spanish Army of the Napoleonic Wars Vol.2) description for the pictured officer says that this uniform was "white jacket and trousers, red collar, cuffs and piping, gold epaulettes and plain black round hat."  

The figures are Front Rank straight out of the box, without modification.

The flag is by Adolfo Ramos. It is a complete fudge and probably bears no relation to any flag this unit carried. I have bent the flag (actually for Valencia) so that it is hard to tell what flag it actually is. A simple case of any flag will have to do.

The watercolour of this unit shows an officer's jacket without turnbacks. The Front Rank officer figures come as pictured (they do not have turnbacks) but, the accompanying rank and file figures do have turnbacks: Given the red piping I have, for ease, painted the turnbacks on the rank and file red - they could just have easily been white piped red (if they ever existed on the uniforms of the rank and file in the first place).

The watercolour shows that the pictured officer sports a black sword belt over his right shoulder. I have chosen to follow that belt colour into the rank and file because it's a nice contrast against the white jacket.

 

Apparently, on landing up in Cadiz, this battalion (only one battalion was raised) was deployed to help serve the Cadiz artillery. It won distinction in the city's forward batteries and serving as an infantry battalion at the Battle of Chiclana [sic. Barrosa]. 

Given that it served as infantry during the Battle of Barrosa, I wonder if when with artillery in the forward works it was deployed as detachments to defend the Spanish guns from the incursions of marauding French raiders during the long siege, rather than as extra gun crew - just a speculative thought.

When I started this series of posts I promised seven units of newly painted infantry - this is the seventh, bringing the total infantry units done to eleven - so that should be it for the additional infantry but, I've continued painting and there are a few more units to come. First though, the promised posts on the three newly painted cavalry units: Next up my Olivenza Cazadores.

BTW. One of the reasons, discounts aside, that I tend to buy everything at once (this army was basically bought as one purchase and only Front Rank's issues during Covid meant it was delivered in bits) is for active painting periods like this one. A lead pile is there for this reason: I don't want to be messing about with planning figure orders when I'm in the mood for painting.