Before he commanded the Continental Army, Washington spent five hard years learning his trade in the French and Indian War. He was twenty-two when, as a lieutenant colonel of the Virginia Regiment, his force ambushed a small French party at Jumonville Glen in May 1754 — an action that helped trigger what became the global Seven Years' War. Six weeks later he surrendered Fort Necessity, the only surrender of his military career, after signing capitulation terms in French he could not read. Within a year he was riding with Braddock's expedition to the Monongahela, had two horses shot from under him and four bullet holes in his coat, and helped organize the survivors after Braddock was killed. He spent the rest of the decade as colonel commanding Virginia's frontier defense, frustrated by the lack of regular British commission and supplies he kept asking for, but learning. By 1758, on the Forbes Expedition that finally took Fort Duquesne, he was a competent and proven field officer.

This figure shows him in the dress of a Virginia Regiment officer of that period — dark blue coat with red facings, red waistcoat and breeches, the officer's sash across his chest, tricorne, sword and walking stick. The face is the younger Washington, before the gravitas of the Continental Army years and before he became the marble figure of presidential portraits, when his reputation was still being built. He pairs with W. Britain's other Washington figures Breagans carries — General Washington Mounted, the standing 1780-83 figure, and Washington's Inauguration — for a Washington-through-his-career arrangement that begins here.

1/30 scale (60mm), matte-painted, single figure boxed. Catalog number 10200. 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.