In 1775 the Continental Congress appointed George Washington commander of the new Continental Army; for the next eight years he ran what was, by any reasonable measure, an under-supplied insurgent force against one of the most powerful militaries in the world. The 1775-80 period covered by this figure is the long middle of that war: he took the army out of Boston, lost New York, recovered with the surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton, fought the British to a stalemate at Brandywine and Germantown, held the cause together through the Valley Forge winter, and stood off General Clinton's army at Monmouth. The strategic picture only turned decisively in his favor with the French alliance and, eventually, the Yorktown campaign in 1781. He spent most of these years in the saddle — riding the lines, holding a fragile coalition together by personal example.

This figure shows Washington mounted in his Continental Army general's uniform — blue coat with buff facings, yellow waistcoat and breeches, black tricorne — astride a gray horse of the type he was known to ride (Blueskin, his favorite Arabian, was gray). It is the classic equestrian portrait of him, the image John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale fixed in the period record. As a mounted figure he anchors a Revolutionary War display the way Lincoln anchors a Civil War one: the named commander on horseback above the rank-and-file figures of his army. He pairs with the other W. Britain Washington figures Breagans carries — the standing 1780-83 figure, the Virginia Regiment colonel from his French and Indian War service, and Washington's Inauguration — for a Washington-through-his-career arrangement.

1/30 scale (60mm), matte-painted, single mounted figure boxed. Catalog number 16208. 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.