The Military Art
of
LUCIEN ROUSSELOT

By: John Stallaert ABOVE: Lucien Rousselot, Painter to the French Army, at work in his studio.

To write about a man I have admired for more than 30 years is hardly easy. It is difficult, for example, to know just how to represent him without offending his modesty, equalled only by his great talent. He is one of the men who have made a veritable science of uniformology! His name is Lucien Rousselot, born at the beginning of the last century in a France still humiliated by its defeat in 1871. At school, like other children during the "Belle Epoque", he immersed himself in France's glorious history. This was an age when the ideas of home and country were pushed to their limits in the schools, an intensely patriotic time when military parades attracted large crowds.

Rousselot's drawing of French cavalrymen during the Seven Years War, reproduced through the courtesy "La Sabretache".

The above plates are the first 3 in a series of 60. The originals are owned by the S.K. Brown Military Collection, Rhode Island, who have been given reproduction permission.

Once estranged from his people after the unfortunate Dreyfus affair, and military repressions of the working classes, the French Army had again become the beloved prodigal son of a nation worried by the menace of pan-Germanism. It is not surprising to learn that in 1912, young Lucien Rousselot would clap his hands excitedly and jump for joy whenever a regiment of Cuirassiers passed by on parade. He already knew by heart the different kinds of harnessing and would amuse himself in the evenings by drawing and redrawing them in his school notebook. It was during this time that a certain brand of chocolate included in each wrapper a coloured paper figurine of one of the soldiers of France's history. Eagerly unwrapping each newly-purchased chocolate bar to remove the paper soldier, young Lucien learned, upon reading the brief text printed on the backs, that these figurines were inspired by publications bearing the curious names of "La Sabretache" and "La GIberne". Rousselot was fourteen when the First World War broke out. Like all teen-age French boys, he dreamed of fighting against France's enemies with the "Poilus" and the "Tommies", joined in 1917 by the "Sammies". Inspired by the periodicals of the time, illustrated by such artists as Francois Flameng and George Scott, he would draw, with a now much surer hand, the uniforms of these "Mud Soldiers".

Rousselot's research on a specific subject evolves into a study of each figure before he begins the finished art work for a plate. Above a detailed painting of "Chevaux-Legers Polonais".

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