Soleil Royal 1693 by John Ott - Heller - 1:100 - PLASTIC

[John Ott]

I guess we’ll find out if this forum has the patience for another Heller 1/100 Soleil Royal build log. This one will be focusing on changes, mods, upgrades, additions, styrene-bashing, and general mess-making in pursuit of something just a little different from the boxtop. Hello modelers—my name is John. I’m a lifelong plastic model kit enthusiast who never builds anything according to instructions. I first saw Heller’s 1/100 Soleil Royal when, as a commercial art student, I worked for a short time at Revell in Venice, CA, airbrushing backgrounds for box cover art. It was around 1978–79. One of the big shots had the unbuilt Heller kit opened on his desk. I was gobsmacked, and vowed to build the kit one day.

 

Unfortunately, display space at home was scarce, and I knew that the model wouldn’t survive the irregularities and frequent moves of a twentysomething punk’s lifestyle. I kept putting off getting the kit until things got settled a bit.

 

Now, 45 years later, I figure it’s now or never.

 

In the half-century the kit’s been in production, it’s been controversial, an inspiration for a lot of palaver and condemnation. For a supposed “scale” model, there’s a lot that’s questionable about it, and if you aren’t familiar with the shortcomings, it’s because you haven’t read the other Soleil Royal build logs yet. However, the more I read and the more knowledge I picked up, the better this kit looked. I decided I could build an attractive representation of one of Louis XIV’s premier rang (first rate) ships-of-the-line from this kit. It would be impressive, if not wholly accurate. Many features would be exaggerated, but I’ve never had a problem with a certain degree of caricature modeling in small scales. I’m not a fine-scale modeler. I’m familiar with all the compromises accepted in other categories of modeling. Why not ships?

 

Besides, I had decided my Soleil Royal would look different from the usual. I love to add stuff and change the detailing on kits. I haven’t found a kit yet I couldn’t customize.

 

Here’s what I started with in November, 2022.
 

 

The kit is beautiful, well-detailed and nearly free of flash and mold lines. State of the art when it was released in 1974. Parts fit well and the few large pieces that were slightly warped (no kit is perfect) were fixable with a little work. The box was delivered in November. I stared at the pieces for a while and then started reading reference books, websites, and build logs. I learned a lot from other Soleil Royal build logs on this forum and others. I am continually delighted, amazed, and entertained by the work of Marc LaGuardia (Hubac’s Historian) and his correspondents. The work I’ll be showing off here is the direct result of the knowledge they have generously shared. I’m a metaphorical fig newton, standing on the shoulders of giants, or however it goes. 

 

I didn’t clip a sprue or squeeze a glue tube until February, but here’s what my project looked like in August, after six months work—finally ready for masts and rigging. (More beauty shots at the end of the post.) 

I propose to show how I got to this point in weekly posts that will also contain some hopefully-interesting-slash-useful history and background of the ship. There’s a lot of stray information (and disinformation) about this ship floating around, and I’m going to try and assemble all the important bits in one place. The prototype was a remarkable work of Baroque art as well as a weapon of war. A floating castle of death-dealing artillery decorated by the same artistes who built and filigreed the palace of Versailles. The dichotomy is delicious.

 

SO WHAT IS BEHIND HELLER’S KIT?

The model is patterned after an 1837 wooden ship model in Paris’s Musée National de la Marine, made by the skilled ship modelmaker Jean-Baptiste Tanneron. You’ll be hearing about the Tanneron model a lot. Copying it was a logical thing for the Heller mold-crafters to do, since it was the only well-known detailed representation of the Soleil Royal from historic times. One of the first things I did was tape together half the hull and propped it up to make a comparison photo.

 

 

But copying the Tanneron model brought Heller problems. The first is the true identity of the ship. There were three ships built in Louis XIV’s time named Soleil Royal. The first was built in 1668–70. Hereafter, I’ll call that one Soleil Royal I. The second was a from-the-keel-up rebuild of the first ship in 1688–90. That’s Soleil Royal I(a). The third was a new ship built in 1692–93, Soleil Royal II. All three were 100+-gun premier rang three-decker royal flagships, extravagantly ornamented to reflect the glory of Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil, the Sun King. The Musée de la Marine is noncommittal about which ship Tanneron’s model represents.

 

According to Heller’s literature, the kit represents the first two ships (considered as one), which met its fate in an encounter with an English fire ship in 1692. I’ve come to believe this is the wrong ship. Heller is partially to blame for the confusion, but in their defense, the Heller die-makers working in the early 1970s didn’t have the instant access to books and internet information we enjoy today, and the museum authorities they consulted were apparently not very helpful.

 

The second major problem with the model is that the hull has too shallow a draft. According to surviving records, the 2400-ton 170-foot ship should have a draft of 24 feet. The Tanneron and Heller models—nope!

 

 

Third, to compound the problem, the above-the-waterline dimensions are exaggerated. The gundecks have lots of headroom—eight feet, compared to the six feet on actual 3-decker warships. There would be very few cases of concussion by clumsy gunners going bonk on overhead beams if they sailed on a ship with Tanneron’s dimensions. Here’s the Heller model with a scale line drawing of another ship from the same time period, the Foudroyant:

 

 

Aaaand… let’s quit there. Let’s not even discuss the height and width of the stern.

 

 

What was Jean-Baptiste Tanneron thinking? Unfortunately, we can’t ask without a ouija board. It should be noted, however, that before the invention of photography, representations of historical objects in artwork (or sculpture, or modelmaking) weren’t anywhere near modern standards of accuracy. Living in an information-and-photography-saturated society, our attitudes about fidelity to prototypes have evolved a lot.

 

For myself—I think the impression of a tall, castle-like warship is enhanced by Tanneron’s exaggeration of the proportions. And this is no modern interpretation. Have a look at the only eyewitness sketch of one of the Soleil Royals in action. Look how high the exaggerated sheer is in the drawing and compare that to the Tanneron model. Oh yeah! Both artists made this ship big, and high, and a true seagoing fortress. That should be the biggest takeaway from seeing artwork or a model of this leviathan. I think the Tanneron model (and the Heller kit) gets the point across nicely. 

 

 

So in the end, if you choose to build the Heller Soleil Royal, you’re really building a model of a 19th-century model, and it’s a caricature model anyway. For complete intellectual honesty, you should get out your wood-colored paints and wood-grain-duplicating techniques and make the model look as if it were carved from fine hardwoods; a model of Tanneron’s model. That would be a commonsensical approach.

 

Fortunately for me, I have no common sense when it comes to models. I want have fun detailing, painting, and rigging a plastic model ship. Here are more photos of my progress up to August, 2023.

 

 

Not much gold leaf on my version of the ship. After some reading, I don’t believe there was a great deal of gilding on the prototype. Figuring out what to paint the ship, based on surviving descriptions, old artwork, historical painting practices, and antique models, was a major part of the research. Paint choices and decorations will be discussed in later posts.

 

 

Deck furniture got changed. Many trips to Ikea.

 

 

Much time was pi—ah, productively spent—rigging tiny guns and rebuilding tiny boats.

 

 

Guns were either replaced or rearranged and drilled out to the right calibre. Colorful gunport lids will be installed as soon as I finish the channels and shrouds. 104 guns were mounted, same as the ship had in the period I’m trying to model (very early 1700s). The waterline got raised to squeeze in a few more feet of draft. Quarter galleries got entirely rebuilt to better resemble a surviving historical drawing.

 

I believe that the enclosed “bottle” quarter galleries on late 17th-century French warships had removable panels—whether for weather or for war. I left the upper gundeck balcony open to demonstrate this. 

 

 

Most of the ship’s gilding is up high—out of the way of waves and wear. 

 

 

Wasn’t happy with the too-big kit-supplied figures, plus, I needed a few new ones to match the drawing of the quarter galleries I was referencing, so I sourced new figures from the Shapeways 3D-print marketplace. Figuring out all the ship’s iconography was a deep research rabbit-hole, but a rewarding one. For the curious, the figures on the forward edges of the quarter galleries are Kronos, “father time,” (starboard), and his consort Rhea, mother of the Olympian gods (port). The other two figures are replacements for the kit’s too-large allegorical figures of America (port, with feathers) and Africa (starboard, with elephant-head headdress). The figures were “dressed” with additional sheet styrene.

 

Next week we’ll get the project going by seeing what mods and additions were made to the hull, plus background on the three Soleil Royals and the whys behind which one I’m modeling. I invite discussion in the meantime. Happy modeling 'till then!

 

 

[Ferrus Manus]

Your blood pressure cuff might be the most important tool in this build. 

[Hubac's Historian]

I’m in!  

[popeye2sea]

Welcome.  Looking forward to your added research and knowledge. And the build looks great too!

 

Regards,

Henry

[Kevin]

that is fantastic

[Hubac's Historian]

“Delicious” dichotomy, indeed, John!  That precisely expresses my own fascination with ships of this epoch.  I am so glad that you are finally bringing your unique expression and perspective to light in a build-log for your ship.  I am absolutely certain that many others, previously unaware, will be absolutely gob-smacked by your talents.  Not a fine-scale modeler?  I stridently disagree!🤩

 

So, one thing that has always bothered me a little is that so many vocal types on the various message boards love to complain vociferously about the kit’s numerous flaws and inaccuracies - essentially calling it a pile of junk - yet, they hold Tanneron’s model in the highest regard.  Well, what you have so perfectly illustrated is the fact that the Heller kit is really a very direct copy of the Tanneron model; many of the Heller flaws originate in the Tanneron model.

 

The thing I find so remarkable about the origination of the Prestige Series is that Heller made it possible, for a moderate sum, to bring faithful copies of world-class museum models into the average person’s home.  They are flawed, yes, but aren’t we all to some degree or other?

 

When I first spied the very pressing I am building from, in my next door neighbor’s hobby room shelves, back in 1981 (he was building the 1:200 Heller Royal Louis, at the time), I was instantly hooked, and thereafter obsessed with this magnificent puzzle of a ship.  Unfortunately, Mark Hansen did not live long enough to build the ship in retirement, as he had planned to.

 

All of this informs my view that there aren’t any “perfect” ship models.  All models are constrained by the quantity and coherence of their service records and portraiture.  In my opinion, an effective scale model is one that strives for fidelity to the period, while stimulating debate about its various details, and INSPIRING others to see what else may be possible.

 

John’s Soleil Royal is all that and more!

Edited September 3, 2023 by Hubac's Historian

[popeye2sea]

Indeed!

 

Well spoke.

 

Henry

[Baker]

Very impressive. 

Great work

[Theodosius]

Just wow!

 

[Bill97]

Welcome John to the Heller Soleli Royal build family. Enjoying very much reading through your build. Your analysis, experimentation, and interpretations, are fun to witness. Beautiful job so far. Will be following along. I agree with you on the incredible sources and help on MSW like Marc and Henry. They have helped me immensely. I have been working on my SR and posting my build since last October. The moderators still have not included it in the index. Here is my link if you would like a view of one more 😊.

 

https://modelshipworld.com/topic/33097-le-soleil-royal-by-bill97-heller-1100/page/19/

[John Ott]

Let’s see the three Soleil Royals and figure out why I decided to build the last one. Thanks to Guy Maher and his Soleil Royal log on Ships of Scale for organizing a lot of the following information. His PDF guide to the ship is a treasure trove. (It’s in French—get a good online translator.)

 

The biggest issue with building any model of the Soleil Royal is simply that we don’t know much about what the ship looked like in real life. The few pieces of surviving artwork raise as many maddening questions as answers. It’s like getting a story from an unreliable narrator. In spite of in-depth research by half a century of dedicated hobbyists, we don’t seem to be much closer to finding out how the Soleil Royal really looked as we were when the Heller kit was first produced.

 

 

Soleil Royal I was a harbor queen at Brest for 20 years. The big 106-gun three-decker was intended to be a flagship for the channel fleet. It needed a huge crew and was expensive to maintain in sailing condition, so it was laid up and never got much attention until its timbers were so rotten that it was taken apart in 1688 and rebuilt from the keel up. See Soleil Royal I(a).

 

Not much is known about the first version of this ship, built by Brest shipwright Laurent Hubac (1612–1682). Hubac built around 50 ships-of-the-line heavily influenced by state-of-the-art Dutch warships. There are no surviving plans for the Soleil Royal because it’s probable that none were used in its construction. There are letters in the French archives from First Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, head of the French navy, encouraging his shipbuilders to start using uniform dimensions and plans on paper. Unfortunately, the ship constructors in Brest were a stubborn and conservative lot who built their vessels the same way that medieval architects built French cathedrals—by knowledge and rote, without drawing plans. So the first Soleil Royal was probably built without visual documentation. Nobody bothered to draw artwork of the ship, either. We have some paragraphs broadly describing the stern sculpture, that’s all.

The print above is from an engraving in a 1690 book on French ships by Henri Sbonski de Passebon, and was thought to be the Soleil Royal by some authors. But Sbonski de Passebon was a galley captain in Toulon who had no opportunity to see (or draw) a ship harbored at Brest. The engraving was, at best, guesswork. It’s no good as a representation of the Soleil Royal because the numbers and arrangement of the gunports are different and it has no armed forecastle. Who knows what other details are wrong?

 

I think a better starting point for considering how this ship looked would be one of Willem Van de Velde’s drawings of a similar ship built by Laurent Hubac in the same time period. Here’s another one of his premier rang 104-gun three-deckers, Reine (ex-Royal Duc), built by Hubac the same year as Soleil Royal. I’ll bet the first version of the Soleil looked similar. It has an armed forecastle, a fat stern (a Hubac trademark), a big stern plate, and full-figure sculptures sitting on the stern quarters, just like what the Soleil Royal was supposed to have.

 

 

If we use a little Photoshop and attach the Soleil Royal’s stern… the result doesn’t look too bad. Plausible. But—

 

 

But as the subject for a model, Soleil Royal I leaves too much to the imagination. The Heller hull would need massive modification and a lot of scratch-building to look anything like this. Too much work. Let’s move on.

 

 

This is the version many modelers seem to want to build, thanks to the superb artwork by Jean Bérain (1640–1711), dessinateur de la Chambre et du cabinet du Roi, the king’s chief decorator, who made the drawings as a proposal for dressing up the 1688-1690 rebuild of the ship. In addition to the drawings, we have paintings, made by Jean Vary, that show the ship entirely painted in blue. (Spoiler—it probably wasn’t. This will be discussed in a later post.) These may have been made for presentation to the king, showing le monarque what his ship-decorators intended for his favorite namesake royal vessel.

The son of Laurent Hubac, Étienne Hubac (1648–1726), was responsible for rebuilding the ship. Surviving documents say that much of the ornamentation from Soleil Royal I was recovered and reused. Some of the weighty sculpture was redone in a smaller size to reduce the ship’s top-heaviness. Bérain designed “bottle” quarter galleries for the ship—all balconies enclosed. This was the regulation style after 1673.

Regrettably, there’s a good chance Berain’s designs were never implemented. The Nine Years’ War broke out before the ornamentation on the rebuilt ship could be finished. In 1690, the ship sailed off to fight le perfide Britannique sans fancy paint or sculpture, and met its end in a fateful kiss with a fire ship at La Hogue in 1692. 

 

There are obvious differences between the Bérain drawings and the Tanneron-model-based Heller kit, notably, the design of the quarter galleries, the proportions of the stern, and the number of lights—windows—on each deck balcony. Tanneron had access to the Bérain drawings and it seems like he deliberately disregarded them. Even by the lax standards of historical representation in Tanneron’s time, there are just too many discrepancies. These issues vanish if we assume he was modeling a different ship.

 

Modifying the kit to resemble this version is a good project for those who like to scratch-build in styrene and have the time to invest. They have to widen the Heller hull and more or less replace the entire model fore, aft, and above the gundecks. Hubac’s Historian (Marc LaGuardia) has a wonderful build log on this site describing his adventures doing this. If this approach interests the reader, I strongly suggest continuing with that build log. I’m content to admire it from afar. This is too much work for me. My Soleil Royal build will be simpler.

 

 

The simple little watercolor-and-gouache sketch above is the only artwork of a Soleil Royal in action made by an eyewitness, so we know this version of the ship was really painted blue. It appears on the five-meter scroll made of the order of battle for Velez-Malaga in 1704, painted by French officer Jérôme Hélyot, who participated in the engagement. This ship is likely the inspiration for the Tanneron model. One of the prominent researchers of the early French navy, Jean-Claude Lemineur, author of The Ships of the Sun King, identified the Tanneron model as being the Soleil Royal II. Skilled French modelmaker and researcher Michel Saunier thought the same thing. These are strong arguments from authority.

 

The model’s arrangement of gunports and the design of the quarter galleries are close to what we know about the Soleil Royal II. Tanneron built other model ships in the Musée from the same 1690s time period as Soleil Royal II. It’s possible his intent was to document the time of the “Second Marine,” when the French fleet was rebuilt following the disaster at La Hogue.

 

The Soleil Royal II was built in 1692 by Étienne Hubac. In a letter to Louis XIV, he pleaded to be allowed to rename his recently-completed ship from Foudroyant to Soleil Royal in honor of his dad’s ship lost at La Hogue. In the same letter, Hubac disclosed he still had all les gabarits (moulds, maquettes, and templates for the decorations) from the previous ship. The Soleil Royal I(a) had been stripped of many of its finished sculptures before the battle. All these were apparently available for reuse on the Soleil Royal II. New carvings based on the surviving les gabarits filled in the gaps. 

 

I figured that it took the least amount of effort to turn the Heller model into a semi-respectable resemblance of the Soleil Royal II. That was going to be my goal. 

 

And no, I wasn’t going to accept all the peculiarities built into the Tanneron model and copied by the kit. It’s clear that Tanneron wasn’t completely faithful to historical sources. I saw no reason to be completely faithful to him.

 

Besides, it’s fun to do your own thang, man.

 

Now that I had decided which ship to build, I could plan changes to the hull. 

 

I chose Winfield & Roberts’ French Warships in the Age of Sail 1626–1786 to be my guide. It’s always fun to piggyback off other people’s meticulous research. In their description of the Soleil Royal II, they listed the armed gunports on each deck (104 total), and happily, the Hélyot sketch agreed with them. This meant the Heller hull needed a few ports added and a few ports moved.

 

 

 

Tanneron gave his model 102 armed gunports. This was because the ship was armed with 102 guns at the Battle of Velez-Malaga. Later research showed that the ship actually had emplacements for 104 guns (minus the fore and aft ports, and the four poop deck ports, which usually did not have guns mounted.) 

 

There are 100 gunports on the Heller kit (again, not counting the fore and aft ports). The last pair of ports on the middle gundeck is supposedly hidden inside the kit’s enclosed quarter galleries, but they're visible on the Tanneron model, which has open galleries. So the middle gundeck is missing the last port on each side. The kit’s quarter deck is short two ports on each side, and the poop needs an additional one. Also, the spacing of the last pairs of ports on the middle and lower gundecks is uneven. No chase ports needed to be cut; a note in Winfield & Roberts said that the chase ports in Soleil Royal II were never pierced.

 

I decided that the last ports in the middle gundeck didn’t need to be cut because I was going to have them hidden behind the panels of the quarter galleries. I had made the decision to modify (and shrink) the kit’s quarter galleries. There are several good reasons for this, which will be covered in a later post. For now, the major consequence of that decision was that four of the gunports of the Heller kit formerly incorporated into the quarter galleries were now going to be exposed like the others.

In real life, the framing of the ship dictated regular spacing of the gunports. The Heller hull had to be modified to reflect that.

 

I made a list of things to do for each hull half—

1. Lower deck—move last gunport forward 3/32”
2. Middle deck—move last gunport aft 1/4” (and optional—add last port)
3. Upper deck—finish last port frame (formerly part of the kit’s quarter galleries)
4. Quarter deck—fill in rectangular window, add last two ports (for a total of six QD ports on each side)
5. Poop—add one more port

When complete, the modified hull sides would have 108 ports, armed and unarmed—just like the Hélyot sketch.

 

I Photoshopped the changes to be made: 

 

 

And went to work with X-acto blades and my variable-speed Dremel with a grinder attachment. 

 

 

Sheets of Evergreen plastic in a variety of thicknesses provided the patches, and Tamiya white putty filled in the cracks and oopsies. The job was finished off with a variety of needle files and sanding sticks. New wood grain was carved in with the X-acto blade and the whole thing roughed up with a wire brush.

 

One of the good qualities of the Heller kit is that the quarter deck and forecastle are separate pieces. Easier to work on that way. A lot of the decorative strakes had to go so they wouldn’t interfere with the new décor. There is a lot of floral carving detail on both pieces. None of it is from the Tanneron model and it looks like it was halfway inspired by the Bérain drawings, but it is also really insignificant and looks like the Heller die-maker was having a rotten day after fighting with his wife. I opted to remove it all and substitute something of my own. I was also going to replace the plain round gunport frames with new decorated ones, so away they went too. Sanding sticks, Ho!

 

I drilled out the additional round gunports. The spacing of the last three on the quarterdeck was tightened up a bit for fit. With everything else to attract attention on the finished ship, I don’t think it will be noticed. The missing rectangular gunport frames on the aft upper deck were made from 2mm sheet styrene and 2mm 1/2-round Evergreen strips. I ordered new round gunport frames—little brass jewelry whatchamacallits from the craft website Etsy. In the photo, I tried on a few for size. They won’t be attached until a later step.

 

 

Last step for the gunports for now—I added some thickness to the hull visible through the gunports. Ships of the line back then were true castles of oak, with thick walls of framing and planks, not thin shells. I probably should have used 1/8” styrene strips, but I didn’t want to go back to the hobby store and I had a big surplus of 1/8” stripwood. Someone with better ship-modeling knowledge than me would use precise thicknesses and taper the thickness from lower deck to middle deck, but for me, the 1/8” (approximately a scale foot) helps the appearance just enough.

 

 

Now that I had all the gunports in order, I made a list of extra things to add to the hull—

1. Bolts and trennals (NOT!)
2. Wale scarfs
3. Fenders and ladder rails
4. Anchor linings
5. Scuppers
6. Stern plate extensions

My reference for these was Peter Goodwin’s Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War 1650–1850. I made a leap of faith in thinking that shipbuilding technology in the 1690s wasn’t all that different in la nation de boutiquiers across the Channel.

 

NUTS TO BOLTS—

I planned to add bolts. I even went online and bought a shi(p)load of 2” HO bolt-heads from Tichy Train Group. God, they were TINY!

 

A lot of ship modelers add bolt-heads to wales as a matter of course. They also indicate trennals (tree-nails) on planks. It looks cool, but it has always bothered me. Were bolts and trennals really all that visible on ships of that period? They show up in period artwork, but they aren’t that apparent on the HMS Victory or the USS Constitution. These are ships from a century later than the Soleil, I know, but still. The remains of the Vasa in Stockholm is covered with bolt-heads, but they’re all modern replacements to keep the rusty iron of the originals from further corroding and damaging the ship. There aren’t many other period ships to examine for guidance.

 

 

2,000+ exposed bolts on the surface of a wooden ship’s hull doesn’t make sense to me anyway. 2,000 bolt-holes exposed to the sea? Dry ship? No way!

 

So what does Goodwin say about trennals and bolts?

 

Trennals—“The advantage of wooden dowels was that when they got wet the wood expanded, thus tightening the fastening.” After boring the plank and frame underneath, “the trennel was then driven in, and made flush.” So, no surface indication for trennals.

 

Bolts—“It was considered good practice to bore out the timber on either side, to a depth and diameter of the head and the rove. Once the bolt was fastened the remaining space was filled with some form of caulking, and faired off with the faces of the timbers.” No surface indication of bolts, either. And I can’t imagine a premier rang French flagship being built without “good practice.”

 

That left the question of why all those bolt-heads show up in period drawings. In truth, I don’t know the answer, but in the end I opted to go with instinct and forego the bolts. My Soleil Royal would have smooth sides and wales, like the HMS Victory.

 

Whew. Too bad I bought all those bolt-heads. On the other hand, I don’t have to drill 2,000 holes in the wales. That’s a relief. I think my old Dremel would die screaming.

 

WALE BUTTS—

Say that three times without cracking up. One thing that I could fix easily was all the butt joints Heller’s die-makers put on the wales. Should be scarfs instead. I filled in the butt joints with Tamiya white putty and referenced one of J.C. Lemineur’s drawings of L'Ambitieux (cribbed from online) to place some scarfs.

 

J.C. Lemineur, L'Ambitieux

 

It took very little time to scribe in the new ones. Here’s how they looked a little further on, after some primer had been applied.

 

 

Have a good look. The scarfs will be invisible when the wales are painted dark brown.

 

FENDERS and ladder rails—

were added using Evergreen styrene strips. According to Goodwin, the dimensions were usually 14”–16” proud from the sides of the ship by 4”–5” wide, but those honestly looked too big and distracting. I cut them down to about a foot. Goodwin also says there were usually 4 or 5 fenders per side, but he’s probably referencing later English ships. I opted to copy a drawing of the 1693 Royal Louis and added three.

 

 

ANCHOR LININGS—

I got out the kit’s anchor castings, built one, and swung it from where I supposed the catheads would be to figure out where the anchor linings should go. Goodwin’s book also had diagrams. Built them from more Evergreen strips. The gap between the main wales was filled in from the anchor linings forward. My linings are probably too robust—but they’re going to have a lot of distracting detail close at hand, so I’m not inclined to perform a do-over.

 

 

SCUPPERS—

According to Goodwin, there were six to eight per deck per side. I settled for seven. Goodwin said they should be flush with the sides, but I like them standing out a bit, as J.C. Lemineur has drawn them in one of his detailed renderings of Le Saint Philippe. Cut from Evergreen square tubing.

 

 

STERN EXTENSION—

When I started, I had the idea of using most of the kit’s quarter galleries, just moving them aft about 1/2 inch to clear two of the gunports. In order to do this, I figured I needed to extend the stern 7/16” at the taffrail and slanting down to 3/16” at the lower edge of the stern plate. This was done with 2mm sheet styrene. That exaggerated the already-too-high taffrail even worse, so I redesigned the quarter galleries yet again (you’ll see them in a later post) and ended up chopping off most of the new stern extension. I left the 3/16” at the bottom edge, though.

 

 

Can we glue stuff yet? Not anywhere close.

 

 

I still have to think about what I'm going to paint this thing. Next week, we’ll see what goes into that decision and find out where some of the divergent information about the Soleil Royal’s paint and color—um, diverged.

 

Fluctuat nec mergitur. Happy modeling .

 

 

 

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by John Ott

[Hubac's Historian]

Awesome historical recap, John.  The two best books in my library are both Rif Winfield books: French Warships, as you reference, and First Rate.

 

I do think it is probable that the ship was repaired after Beveziers and her ornamental program completed (I have repair estimates from the archives, after the fleet’s return to port), before Barfleur in 1692.  However, like most other things related to SR, there are no concrete records detailing the specifics of this.  The screen shots I have of these repair estimates are barely legible.

 

I will have to remember “Harbor Queen,” as I design my conjectural 1670 SR.  It’s hard for me not to imagine the members of ABBA as Admiral and supporting officers 😀

[John Ott]

Hi Marc. It would be nice to think that the ship had its ornamental program finished at some point. Given that it was in the middle of a war and that there was controversy about the weight of the sculptures, I think it's questionable from a practical standpoint, but as you say, there's enough vagueness in the historical record that the answer can go either way. (Specifically, either way we as modelers want.) 

I heard the term "harbor queen" used for party boats that never left port. Maybe it's a local thing. Lots of harbor queens in the marinas around southern California.

[Ian_Grant]

John, I am really enjoying your historical analysis and will follow to the end, of course. I hope to start my SR in about two years from now, God willing, and am very interested in where you go from here. Thanks for posting!!

[Hubac's Historian]

1 hour ago, Ian_Grant said:

John, I am really enjoying your historical analysis and will follow to the end, of course. I hope to start my SR in about two years from now, God willing, and am very interested in where you go from here. Thanks for posting!!

After seeing your Victory, Ian, I will be very excited to see what you do with this kit.

[John Ott]

(So several months back, I had this huge big plastic model ship kit. Wondering how I was going to paint it. This is what I wrote back in May—)

 

 

If you’re anything like me, you’ll agree that Heller’s Soleil Royal is a striking beauty in the box art, all blue and gold. As if the shipbuilders for le Marine Royale were UCLA alumni (go Bruins!) 

 

 

In the last decade or so, there has been something of a pushback on the Heller color scheme (and not just from USC Trojans). Maybe the Soleil Royal wasn’t blue after all. A few things prompted this.

 

First, there was the late-1990s revision on how the Swedish ship Vasa was interpreted. The 1628 warship, pulled up mostly intact from Stockholm harbor, still had traces of paint, but it took decades to thoroughly examine it. From prior thinking—that the Vasa was blue and gold like the Heller Soleil Royal box art—scholars changed their minds and have now determined that the ship’s upper reaches were mostly red. Plus, the ship’s wooden sculptures weren’t simply gilded—they fully painted in many colors (polychrome). Thoughtful modelers wondered if the Soleil Royal wasn’t likely to have been red too, and if the sculptures were likewise brightly painted instead of uniformly covered with gold leaf.

 

 

The gold leaf itself was another issue. It was pointed out that there was far too much gold on Heller’s version of the ship. It couldn’t all have been gilding. Even Louis XIV couldn’t afford that. Someone went into the French naval archives and figured out that the gold leaf budget for some premiere rang warships was barely enough to gild a figurehead. Applying gold leaf to the working surfaces of the ship—rails, ports, or anywhere in contact with abrasive ropes, tools, hands, etc.—was impractical in any case. Might as well take handfuls of Louis d’or and toss them into the ocean, since the gold would end up there anyway. So gold leaf—nope—most of it had to have been yellow paint.

 

The next prompt came from comments made by author J.C. Lemineur and others, pointing out an alleged scarcity of blue paint in the 1600s. It was claimed that blue pigments were expensive and hard to come by in quantity. “Blue-shade paints were therefore mostly avoided,” Lemineur wrote in his monograph on the 1693 three-decker Le Saint Philippe. Following Lemineur, modelmakers restored their Saint Philippes in red and gold.

 

 

Some Soleil Royal modelers absorbed all this, plus the information from the Vasa, and revised their thinking about how the Soleil should be painted. In some cases, they straightaway swapped all the blue for red.

 

Another red herring dragged across the modeler’s path was the set of c.1689 paintings of Soleil Royal’s bow and stern made by Jean Vary. These showed the ship all blue, stem to stern, main wale to sheer. Wow! 

 

This gave Soleil modelers even more options, some opting for the traditional Heller paint scheme, others going off in a red direction, others going all-blue. 

 

Finally, there was a fourth bit of drama. It was noted that one version of the Jean Bérain drawing of Soleil’s stern had color indications—

 

Some parts light red, some a kind of tan, deep blue on the stern plate, and the figure carvings are in several different color treatments. What was up with that?

 

So I pretty much know the Heller kit's paint instructions are, um… apocryphal. There couldn’t have been that much gold leaf on a real warship, and the whole issue of whether or not it was actually painted blue was being questioned. How should the Soleil Royal be painted? More important to me, how was I going paint my ship? Was it possible to untangle all this information and come up with a likely and justifiable color scheme? Hold my beer.

 

Please keep in mind that the following information is the product of someone who is admittedly sometimes a mad modeler and a dunderhead, poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Marc LaGuardia's (Hubac's Historian's) build log is a better informed source. If it’s important to you, always do your own research and come to your own conclusions! And paint your own ship however it makes sense to you.

 

First, it should be remembered that there were three Soleil Royals in Louis XIV’s reign. (This was discussed in the last post.) Paint never lasted very long in a marine environment—ask any former Navy swabbie. Given the need for frequent repainting, it’s not likely that the three ships had only one paint scheme between them. They undoubtedly changed, year to year, refit to refit. And tastes changed too, over the forty-year period the three ships sailed, as did the artisans and bureaucrats who decided such things. Point number one to consider—the Soleil Royal(s) likely had several paint schemes.

 

That being said, the Soleil Royals got associated with blue paint early on. Blue was a logical color for a royal ship. Besides being a mobile gun platform, a French warship was intended to proclaim the might and majesty of the Sun King and his Bourbon dynasty wherever it sailed. Blue, gold, and white were the royal colors. The Bourbon coat-of-arms had gold fleur-de-lis on a blue field.

 

In much of the art from the early 18th century, the Soleil Royal I(a) is shown with blue on the hull above the gundecks, like in these details of paintings by English artist Peter Monamy dramatizing the destruction of the ship at La Hogue in 1692. Monamy was known for his accurate depictions of naval battles and ship portraits, and he made these paintings when the battle and the ship were still recent history.

 

 

Keep in mind that right-hand image, with light blue on the quarterdeck level and dark blue (with gold fleur-de-lis) on the poop deck level above it. Hmmmm.

 

And here’s the image of the Soleil Royal II on the 5-meter scroll painting of the order of battle for Velez-Malaga in 1704, made by eyewitness and battle participant Jérôme Hélyot.

 

 

Ship’s got the blues. From the upper gun deck up, and some on the middle gun deck level of the quarter galleries.

 

So at least two versions of the ship were painted blue above the gun decks after all. The Heller box art wasn’t that far off. But what about those claims of blue pigments being rare in the 1600s? 

 

Turns out, maybe not so much! 

 

Some blue pigments were rare, or unavailable in large quantities, or unsuitable for ship paint, or simply not invented yet. Ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli), a powdered gemstone from faraway Afghanistan, was worth more per weight than gold and was used only for things like painting the royal crest on first-rate warships. Smalt was blue pigment made from ground potassium-cobalt glass. It wasn’t available in quantities large enough to paint a ship. Plant-based indigo (woad) made poor paint that faded fast in sunlight; it was a better clothing dye. The synthetic pigment Prussian blue (Paris blue) wasn’t invented until 1706. Cerulean and cobalt blues weren’t synthesized until the 19th century.

 

Yet many ship paintings from the Baroque period show blue-painted ships. 

 

 

There’s even a book that discusses it—The Colour Blue in Historical Ships, by Joachim Mullerschon. There are several more blue-painted French ships on Hélyot’s scroll, including— ironically— the supposed-to-be-red Saint Philippe from Monsieur Lemineur’s monograph mentioned above. It had blue above the middle gundeck just like the Soleil Royal. At least, it did in 1704. Huh!

 

 

So where were French shipwrights getting blue paint? 

 

Azurite (azure, azul) is a deep blue copper mineral mined near Lyons, France. It was the most important blue pigment used in the middle ages. By the 17th century, it had been synthesized and manufactured in quantity by mixing copper nitrate with calcium carbonate (chalk). The inexpensive synthetic pigment was called blue verditer (Bremen blue, blue bice) and common enough to be used as wall paint during the 1600s. 

 

Verditer comes from verd de terre (earth green) because natural azurite often came mixed with another greenish copper ore, malachite (copper carbonate hydroxide). Depending on how much malachite was in the mix, azurite could be green or a greenish blue. But synthetic blue verditer could be close to cerulean or cyan in hue. See the swatches below. Blue verditer was often mixed with lead white to make a light blue shade (Versailles blue), or with lampblack, to deepen it.

 

 

Blue verditer isn’t used any more because it needs other paint binders, like casein, rather than common linseed oil and turpentine. Linseed is too acidic and causes the pigment to degrade to dull olive green or black in time. Ship paint rarely lasted long enough for that to happen.

 

Yes—there was plenty of blue paint to paint ships with in the 1600s. 

 

But were any of them painted all blue, like in the Jean Vary paintings?

 

 

What about the Vasa being red with polychrome figures? Was it possible that some version of the Soleil Royal had been painted that way? Well… maybe. We don’t know how the Soleil Royal was painted when it was first built by Laurent Hubac in 1668–70. From the look of his ships, Hubac built with a large helping of Dutch influence, and the Dutch painted their ships with a lot of color. Color was an important component of early Baroque art in Northern Europe. The art style is called Mannerism. It was a holdover from the styles of the Late Renaissance, and by the mid-1600s it was still popular everywhere, it seems, except around Versailles and the French court.

 

 

As head of the French navy, Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert tried to separate the decoration of the royal ships from the actual shipbuilding, with different officials presiding over each function. The same artists and designers working at Versailles were given the job of designing the decorations for the ships, but management was limited to an exchange of letters and drawings. We don’t know how that played out in the shipbuilding port of Brest, which was isolated out on the western tip of remote and rebellious Brittany. It could have been that all those independent, conservative shipbuilders took direction well and dutifully painted the new warships in the approved Versailles style. But maybe Colbert's instruction letters went into la poubelle with the fish wrappings. I think it’s at least possible that Dutch-trained Hubac still had a say in how his ships were painted, and that would have included using a lot of Mannerist-styled color. 

 

On his log on this forum, Hubac’s Historian (Marc La Guardia) has an absolutely beautiful partially-scratchbuilt Soleil Royal that I would place as painted in the Mannerist tradition. It’s the most amazing Soleil Royal model I’ve ever seen! If there were no Soleil Royals painted in the Mannerist tradition, Marc shows us that there should have been!

 

Laurent Hubac died in 1682 and by the late 1680s, the Royal bureaucracy at Versailles was in full control of the shipyards. Jean Bérain was filling in for the aging Charles Le Brun as chief decorator of the king’s warships. From surviving documents we find out that Bérain exercised more control over the process than his predecessors. His detailed drawings of ornamentation and sculpture were apparently followed, and we can suppose his chosen colors were too.

 

What about that one version of the Bérain stern drawing with the color indications? The one with the odd-colored statuary? How do we interpret that? Well—it not only shows all the signs of French Classicism in action, it also directly invokes the architecture of Versailles. Remember that Jean Bérain was the chief decorator of the palace. 

 

 

But I’m more interested in working up a color scheme for the 1693 Soleil Royal II. The end of the 17th century was an age of bright yellow sterns.

 

Ludolf Bakhuizen, Battle of Barfleur

 

 

L to R—Konung Karl, Le Foudroyant (actually painted in 1834, but I like it), Le Royal Louis.

 

The sketch of the Soleil Royal II on Jérôme Hélyot’s 1704 scroll of the Battle of Velez-Malaga shows a ship that looks like it fits right in with that paint scheme.

 

 

What would this look like on the model?

 

 

This is one of my Photoshop/Illustrator sketches—I made several. Okay, fine—but what about separating the decks? Specifically, separating the upper gun deck from the quarterdeck? The way I drew it, they have two different ornamental schemes going on. (I’ll discuss the decorations in a future post.) How about going dark blue / light blue, like the Konung Karl in the All-Blue-and-Gold-Ships box above?

 

 

Cool. But now, what about the poop? Maybe the poop should get its own decoration scheme. Dark / light / dark?

 

 

And yeah—the poop now gets some fleur-de-lis on a dark blue field, similar to other period French warships depicted in art. (See that Monamy painting at the beginning of this post.) Each deck now has its own color and ornamentation. I stared at this variant for about two weeks before deciding I liked it best. Finally decided, you know, I could live with this. 

 

Okay, so—paint! How should I approach painting this plastic model?

 

If we were absolutely true to our perception of scale, all small ship models like Soleil Royal would be built with smooth styrene. Not a hint of texture. There’s hardly any texture to finished and painted wood anyway, and certainly none that would be detectable in 1/100 scale. I dislike many small-scale models made of real wood for this very reason—real wood grain doesn’t show up on that small a scale!

 

This is not what most modelers and viewers expect. They like to see indications of what the thing being modeled was supposed to be made of. Wood should—in most viewer’s minds—look like wood. Metal should look like metal. Stone should look like stone. Never mind that at 1/100 scale, everything should look like smooth plastic.

 

Besides, modeling and painting textures is really cool. The Heller die-makers certainly thought so. They did a hella (Heller) job of giving the sides and decks of the Soleil Royal a great-looking raised wood-grain texture.

 

This sets up an interesting dialog. The real ship was a fairly new, well-kept, premier rang warship that was also a national symbol, cared for by hundreds of low-ranking swabbies with an officer-enforced mandate to keep all hands busy. (“If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, paint it.”) In other words, ships like the Soleil Royal should look almost new.

 

On the other hand, modelers love to age, weather, wear, begrime, and texture surfaces. The Heller model invites this. I don’t want to sand away all that nice wood grain. Likewise, I don’t want to paint over it and pretend it’s not there. I can’t resist the temptation to work with it. At some point, the casual model-builder (me) has to shrug and go with the flow. I’m left trying to find a middle ground between this—

 

 

And this—

 

 

(The Victory and Neptuno are, IMHO, just really, really big model ships.)

 

But I’m not much of a fan of weathering. To my mind, a model ship should look like it has had at most a few weeks at sea, not months and years of neglect.

 

So I’m going to try and make the Heller wood grain subtle, but still present. I’m not going to emphasize joints and plank edges with subsequent washes of detail-enhancing dark color. Decks will look used but well-scrubbed. The hull can look like it has weathered one hard blow off Ushant, but no more. No nails, bolts, trennals or other passages for the Big Wet to penetrate will be visible. 

 

And not much attention will be given to places where I don’t want to attract your eye. Forget about seeing much beyond featureless light grey below the waterline, I don’t want your attention there. And I’ll be using the old illustrator’s trick of using flat black on any details that I want to disappear. Hopefully, the end result won't look too different from my Photoshop sketch.

 

(Nope, it didn't.)

 

 

Next week I'll go through the process of painting the lower hull and the decks. Stay epipelagic 'till then.

 

 

 

Edited September 16, 2023 by John Ott
extra images

[Hubac's Historian]

John, I have not been challenged to look up so many vocab words since my father was still in his right mind.  Apocryphal was on my “frontier” of near-understanding, but epipelagic is a new one for me.  I take you to mean something like “keep on truckin!,” but in the water.  Keep on swimmin!, maybe?

 

As always, I really love your succinct and well-researched info-graphics.  Your historic colorist analysis is the best discussion of 17th Century blues that I have yet seen.

 

As you noted, and have now given me artistic vocabulary to describe it, I chose to paint in the Mannerist style, although not because I was well-versed in the art history of it.  Broadly, I reasoned that if the early Baroque Vasa could be painted so, why mightn’t the later Soleil Royal also be painted so - particularly, when there was a mandate to reduce the use of expensive gold; a broader color palate could be used to highlight the ornamental program.

 

Mostly, for me, that was an artistic choice, but I REALLY appreciate the window of plausible deniability that you have opened for me, in referencing the potential preferences of the Dutch-trained Laurent Hubac.  His early ships were broad like Dutch ships, fitted with very Dutchy head structures, tall-sheered like Dutch ships, and very boxy in the stern.  As intransigent a constructor as he was, perhaps he also insisted on a more Dutchy color scheme.  Thank you for that!

 

I think, though, that the scheme you have chosen for your model hews much more closely to the probable truth of the matter, especially toward the end of the century, as the French were moving towards uniform classifications and construction specs for the rates.  What you have managed to do so beautifully, is to create tremendous visual interest with the color variations between decks, and in the painting of all supporting ornamental mouldings and panels.  Your demonstration of what faux gold might look like is absolutely convincing to me.

 

I’m loving the log so far!

[Hubac's Historian]

I also want to say that your connection of Versailles to the coloration and architecture of SR’s stern is right-on.  For years, I puzzled over just what all of these different color  choices were actually trying to represent.  I thought the bronze sculptures were maybe to indicate ornamental carvings that were preserved from before the refit.  With your parallel color examples to art within Versailles, you have made the probable intent very clear.

[Ian_Grant]

John, your log is fascinating thus far!  I love your colour scheme. I see you moved the waterline up to above the bottom edge of the main wale which is what I plan to do. Would they really have had the gammoning going into the water though? I had it in my mind to move the gammoning slots up a bit.

 

Also. I think you have changed the "angle of attack", as it were, of the waterline? I seem to recall that if I kept her slightly stern-deep as does the Heller w/l while raising it to the wale, the decorative bits at the bottom of the 1/4 galleries ended up touching the water which bothered me too. It seems to me that down-by-the-stern is probably accurate, to have some lateral resistance in the u/w hull profile to compensate for the huge windage on the towering stern or she would need constant windward helm. On the other hand the sail plan might be designed to help compensate. I haven't really studied my model too much; it's been just sitting in my stash for a few years. I have two other build to finish first.

[John Ott]

Marc, your ship needs no rationale or excuse. As model-building in styrene, I've never seen anything like it.

Apocryphal = my status as a middle-class wage-earner in 2023.

Epipelagic = surface waters of the ocean. In other words, don't sink! 

 

I pick up strange terms as a science illustrator. —John.

[John Ott]

Hi Ian—thanks for the encouraging comments. I ended up adjusting the waterline three times to increase the draft. I found artwork that showed ships with a wet main wale and also knew that back then, in the days before slide rules, nobody could really figure a ship's displacement until it was launched and loaded. So, as long as it wasn't Vasa, no big deal.

 

The wet gammoning was a by-blow, but again—it didn't seem to bother J.C. Lemineur in his Saint Philippe plans. So I left it alone. At least I gave it a coat of white stuff. 

 

 

And yeah—I changed the "angle of attack" because it leveled out the gun decks and just looked better to my eye. I like the aggressive look of a down-at-the-bows Baroque warship. I'll let others decide if it was a successful decision.

 

[Hubac's Historian]

4 hours ago, John Ott said:

Marc, your ship needs no rationale or excuse. As model-building in styrene, I've never seen anything like it.

Apocryphal = my status as a middle-class wage-earner in 2023.

Epipelagic = surface waters of the ocean. In other words, don't sink! 

 

I pick up strange terms as a science illustrator. —John.

I can definitely relate to the “middle-class wage earner” statement, but your job sounds a lot more interesting than mine. 

[Hubac's Historian]

4 hours ago, John Ott said:

And yeah—I changed the "angle of attack" because it leveled out the gun decks and just looked better to my eye. I like the aggressive look of a down-at-the-bows Baroque warship. I'll let others decide if it was a successful decision.

 

I, if I may be so bold, will judge that this was a solid move.  One issue with the Tanneron model is that the forward sheer of the lower wales is a little aggressive.  Heller copied this even more aggressively.  lowering the head a little, even if it means submerging the gammoning a little, helps to minimize this exaggeration.  Well done!

 

On a separate note, some (myself included), have taken issue with this or that assertion from Jean Claude Lemineur.  However, he is the only one to delve so deeply into the murky waters of 1680 and beyond.  Over the years, and particularly in my early state of broad ignorance, he was always a very gracious correspondent.

 

Everything that he does, and John does and other builders do, pushes the conversation forward, ever so incrementally.  Let’s all keep going, sharing, discussing, and trying to put the puzzle together.  My hope is to build a broad enough basis of research so that one could reasonably build a model of La Royal Therese - an example of which that still does not exist on any public forum that I know of.

[John Ott]

Oh, that would be fun.

 

 

It's possible that with the advances in 3D printing, sometime in the next decade we'll see somebody making a raw hull of their favorite ship with gunports already pierced, ready for planking, upperworks, and details, and making it available as a garage kit.

 

Or maybe a "corrected" Soleil Royal hull and decks. 

For all I know, this may already have been done. A few friends and I have done that with HO locomotives.

[Hubac's Historian]

It actually already does exist.

[Hubac's Historian]

This guy, Kris from Poland is doing exactly that:

 

 

[Hubac's Historian]

I am hoping to have him print lanterns for me.

[kirill4]

Dear John, this is perhaps the best work done and assumptions according to the color scheme and materials for decor SR. I just enjoyed reading the information provided! Thank you very much! I will watch your construction site with great interest! All the best! Kirill

[John Ott]

Battle of Malaga, by Isaac Sailmaker (c.1633–1721)

 

So what was the Battle of Malaga the Soleil Royal II participated in, and what was the Malaga scroll all about?

 

I’ll save a blow-by-blow description of the battle for another time. (It’s long!) Here’s the condensed version—

 

The Battle of Velez-Malaga on Aug. 24, 1704 was a big, bloody sea engagement off the coast of southern Spain that unfortunately did little to alter the course of the War of Spanish Succession. The short summary is that the English seized Gibraltar from the Spanish and the French navy tried to take it back. Both fleets were big for the time. The French had 50 ships-of-the-line and the English and Dutch, 53. In twelve hours of fighting, 1,585 French, 2,325 English and 700 Dutchmen perished. Many ships were dismasted and heavily damaged, though depending on the sources, few to none were lost. Both fleets were too big and evenly matched to gain a decisive advantage in a single day. 

 

Having expended 100,000 cannon shot, both fleets were afraid of running low on ammunition and so avoided renewing the battle the next day. The British, having suffered the worst, retreated back to the Atlantic leaving only a small, suicidal rear-guard of twenty ships at Gibraltar, certain that the French would attack. The semi-victorious French fleet commander, however, was the Comte de Toulouse, the 26-year-old landlubber bastard son of Louis XIV who had never been in a sea battle before. Badly shaken by the carnage, he was all for calling it a day and taking the fleet back to port. The other French commanders accommodated him. They figured the Spanish could take Gibraltar back by land. We all know how that worked out.

I’ve seen the Malaga scroll described in print as the “Bayeaux tapestry of the French navy.” It’s proper title is the Order of battle held by the naval armies of France, England and Holland in the Mediterranean in the MDCCIV year, when Monsieur le Comte de Toulouse won a victory over the English and Dutch and forced them to abandon the Mediterranean and leave the Strait [of Gibraltar]. The scroll is made from sheets of paper glued to canvas, 5.87 meters by 0.70 meters (19-1/4 feet by 2-1/4 feet).

 

 

On it are painted, in watercolor and gouache, the 194 ships of the French, English, and Dutch fleets that fought at Vélez-Málaga. Each ship is shown in line of battle, sailing left to right, labeled with its name, commander, and number of guns and men. The very precise detailing of the ships—colors, rigging, sails, flags, number of ports, etc.—attest to the knowledge and memory of the painter, Jérôme Hélyot, who participated in the battle as a gunnery officer. Regularly spaced holes and cloth rings show that the piece was meant to be hung on display. This leads to the supposition that Hélyot used the scroll as a training tool for young gunnery officers.
 

 

 

 

Coming from a fairly well-established Parisian family, Jérôme Hélyot began his naval career in 1698 as an ensign on the Amphitrite, the first French frigate sent to China on a commercial voyage, before being recruited as a artillery officer in Toulon in 1701. He took part in all the major land and naval operations of the War of the Spanish Succession. In the battle of Vélez-Málaga, he was on the ship Toulouse, part of the rear-guard squadron under the command of the Marquis de Langeron on the Soleil Royal. 

 

In 1706, Jérôme Hélyot was promoted second lieutenant of artillery and continued a career that led him to the rank of captain and several commands, including the 64-gun 3rd-rank Saint Michel during the 1740–48 War of Austrian Succession. Knighted, he ended his career commanding the forts guarding Brest and died February 8, 1750. His scroll eventually passed into private hands and apparently remained mostly unknown and unstudied until the French Government acquired it in 2016.

 

 

The thing I can’t quite understand is why the Malaga scroll hasn’t gotten more attention from those who study this period of warship development. There doesn’t seem to be a good copy of the scroll anywhere on the internet—I’ve found just a few excerpts in European publications, like the Revue Historique des Armées. (If anyone knows otherwise, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.) The scroll contains the only eyewitness art of a Soleil Royal that I know of. There are color sketches of 50 French ships-of-the-line, plus 53 English and Dutch. I would think the scroll would be a primary source for anyone interested in modeling ships of this age. If it were better known, there might be better choices made for colors and paint.

 

As I discussed last time, I worked from the image on the Malaga scroll to make the color scheme for my Heller Soleil Royal. It was time to start painting some plastic.

 

 

 

I usually have a lot of paint around, so I tend to use what I already got. Most of it is acrylic or other water-based colors, since I’ve poisoned myself with solvent-based paints enough for one lifetime. Acrylic is forgiving, fast-drying, usually dries to a matt finish, and is easily removable—this is important since I strip off paint and redo my work on a regular basis. I’m also acrylic-agnostic, not preferring one brand of the liquid plastic over another. As long as it’s reasonably sturdy and can be thinned enough to spit though an airbrush, I’m happy. My local hobby shop has a big selection of Vallejo colors, so they were the majority of those who answered the casting call. Also featured is a bottle of Liquitex acrylic matt medium, which I brush on after all is dry to remove any shine and help protect the paint surface. G’wan, cast—take a bow.

 

 

The interior of the hull got brush-painted with cheap red craft acrylic—"Deep Burgundy." That included the inner edges of all the gunports. The rest of the ship was hit with Vallejo grey surface primer.

 

At one time in the distant past, my Paasche VL airbrush and I made a good team for painting models. Now, after many years, one-half of the team spits, leaks, and clogs, acts temperamental, and needs replacement parts. Fortunately, my airbrush still works perfectly. We managed to successfully apply primer to the outer hull. Since for some unfathomable reason I put the interior red acrylic on first, I had to plug all the gunports with illustration board to keep the primer out.

 

 

I had scraped and sanded off the kit’s molded-on waterline. The light grey primer was handy for drawing on a new waterline, which touched the lower main wale. I later raised the waterline. Twice. 

 

 

Below are the three colors used for the lower hull halves. The yellow ochre "Antique gold" is pretty generic. The main “doe’s belly” color is Vallejo 70.843 cork brown, and the “black” is a very dark Van Dyke brown—a much warmer hue than cold flat black, which I dislike using on models.

 

 

After the primer dried, the first coat on the hull was yellow ochre brushed on. The gunports were still plugged with illustration board. The waterline was masked just in case I wanted to use the airbrush. In the end, I didn't need it.

 

 

After the paint dried for a day, I sealed it with a coat of matt medium. The second color coat was Vallejo cork brown—“doe’s belly.”

 

 

I didn’t bother painting the main wales, which were going to be black, or the uppermost channel wale, which was going to be left white for now. This coat was left un-sealed. I wanted it removable. Again, after drying, I masked off everything except the wales to be painted black.

 

 

This time, I used the airbrush in a vain effort to avoid paint bleeding under the masking tape.

 

 

 

Ehhh. Not too much touchup needed. 

 

Here’s the fun part—the two shades (yellow ochre and cork brown) were intended to help bring out Heller’s wood texture in a semi-subtle way. After everything dried, the hull was distressed with a combination of scraping, hand sanding, and a dirty wire brush.

 

 

After a while, the high points of the wood texture began to show through with a slightly lighter hue than the “doe’s belly” color. It’s something a viewer has to get up close to see, but it’s just enough “weathering” to satisfy my eye.

 

 

It was about this time I grew unhappy with the waterline. I felt I could squeeze another foot or so for the draft. I clipped and rubber-banded the hull together to sit it on its cradle and made a “waterline indicator” out of foam-core board to serve as a guide, then hand-painted the waterline high enough to partially cover the lower main wale. There was plenty of historical artwork to back me up on this. Lots of ships had wet main wales.

 

 

After going through the exercise twice, my Soleil Royal ended up with a draft of nineteen feet. Not great, but three more feet than before.

 

Decks next—

 

The Heller kit has decks with even-width, parallel planking—not very realistic, according to many modelers who prefer planking tapered to fit the curves of the sides of the ship. I first thought to replace the decks with aftermarket ones, but they were wood, not plastic, and they lacked the nice grain detail Heller added. One thing I like in a model’s presentation is consistency, so the decision was made to go with Heller’s decks. I really doubted anyone would notice the taper of the planks anyway after getting past all the guns, deck furniture, and detail. As a compromise, I took some white putty and my scribing tool and made margin planks.

 

Here’s Peter Goodwin, in Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War 1650–1850: “The function of this [margin plank] was to prevent the normal straight deck planking from being tapered to a fine angle where it met the curvature of the ship’s side…. The margin plank was thus fashioned to receive the butts of those planks.”

 

So on to painting. No primer this trip. First coat was Van Dyke brown brushed on, then wiped away while still wet.

 

 

Second coat was cork brown, dry-brushed on. Began to use a little more, a little less here and there to differentiate some planks. I let it dry.

 

 

Instead of distressing the top coat like on the hull sides, this time I dry-brushed the planks with light grey. A tiny amount of paint was dabbed on the tip of a ragged, throwaway brush which was then used to scrub like hell until the tops of the raised wood grain stood out. This made the deck look bleached by salt and sun and worn by the knees of too many swabbies and their holystones. 

 

 

After sealing it with matt medium, I added the deck furniture according to the instructions—but the more I saw of other models and drawings, the more this began to bother me.

 

 

The decks in the Heller kit come with several double-and quadruple-bitts. Plus many free-standing large, medium, and small knightheads, cleats, and rings—few of which were to be seen in the drawings of the Royal Louis, the deck diagrams of J.C. Lemineur or Jean Boudriot, or were apparent on any of the historical models. Were all those quadruple bitts and free-standing knightheads necessary?

 

Royal Louis

L'Ambitieux—Boudroit

 

Le Francois—Lemineur

 

By now, I knew to question everything.  

 

For reference, I had R.C. Anderson’s The Rigging of Ships in the days of the Spritsail Topmast 1600–1720 and Karl Marquardt’s Eighteen-Century Rigs & Rigging. Both books spelled out each line used in standing and running rigging. Both books had good diagrams and explanations of each line’s function and notes on specific practices used by the French in the time period I’m modeling. In contrast, Heller’s instruction book never gives the names or functions of the lines it tells you to string, and it spreads out the directions over half the book so that you never get the big picture.

 

And then there is the matter of the Heller model having no pin rails. According to the kit, all lines are supposedly attached to pins set into the sheer railing. I know that some historical models do show it this way, but other models have pin rails. It’s hard to find definitive reference, but I think pin rails were in common use by the 1690s, when Soleil Royal II was built.
 

 

Using Anderson and Marquardt, I made an Excel spreadsheet of all the ropes necessary, mast by mast, yard by yard, sail by sail. There were over 300 lines. Something like 250 of them needed belaying points on or near deck, and Anderson and Marquardt were specific about which ones needed pins, cleats, rings, bitts, knightheads, kevels, or channels. Yah! I needed pin rails!

 

It dawned on me that I had to work out the Soleil Royal’s entire rigging plan and belaying points from scratch before settling on specific deck furniture. Oh joy.

 

Well—I had a ways to go before the hull halves were even glued together. I felt like I had plennnnnnty of time to come up with a rigging plan. Next job on the list was painting and decorating the upper gundeck, forecastle, quarterdeck, and poop. That'll be shown next week. And who knows—? I may finish writing my description of the Battle of Velez-Malaga, if anyone is interested. It's a perfectly Baroque tale of aristocratic vainglory, nepotism, valor, cowardice, prudence, mistakes, unnecessary bloodshed, and cold calculation. Plus, I think I found out why the Soleil Royal wasn't the fleet's main flagship.

 

Stay dry 'till then.

 

[Hubac's Historian]

Nice cliff-hanger on the Velez Malaga tale of intrigue!

 

I like your margin plank solution to the deck problem.  I have also, lately, become interested in certain instances where modelers eschew priming; in this instance, the color of the moulded plastic is actually an ally to the desired effect.  The decks really do look brilliant.

 

I’m looking forward to the next installment in this serial build log - clog, leak and spit away!