Marquis de Lafayette 1783

The Marquis de Lafayette is the figure American Revolutionary memory holds up as the pure case for the cause. A nineteen-year-old French aristocrat with a major general's commission he had effectively talked the Continental Congress into giving him, he sailed for America in 1777 against the orders of his own king and joined Washington's army at his own expense. He was wounded at Brandywine that September, organized an orderly retreat under fire, wintered with Washington at Valley Forge, sailed home to lobby Louis XVI for full French intervention, and came back with the troops and ships that made Yorktown possible. By 1783 — the year of this figure — the war was won, the Treaty of Paris was signed, and Lafayette returned to France a hero on both sides of the Atlantic. He spent the rest of his long life in and out of revolutions and revolutionary politics, returned to America in 1824 for a triumphal tour of all twenty-four states, and was eventually made a posthumous honorary citizen of the United States in 2002.

This figure shows Lafayette at twenty-six, in the dress uniform of a Continental Army major general — dark blue coat with buff facings, yellow waistcoat and breeches, the cocked hat with green plume, sash and sword. The face is young, as it should be: Yorktown was only two years before, and Lafayette would live another fifty-one. He pairs naturally with the other Revolutionary-era figures Breagans carries — General Washington Mounted, Alexander Hamilton 1783, and General Rochambeau 1783 — for a Franco-American command group depicting the alliance that won the war.

1/30 scale (60mm), matte-painted, single figure boxed. Catalog number 10062. As with the rest of the W. Britain modern range, the painting is photographic-quality detail intended to read well in dioramas and display cases.