Cartomancy in Art: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Romany-Good-Advice.jpg|thumb|400px|center|Romany Good Advice, 1930s]] | |||
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[[File:Domino-Club-San-Francisco-Menu-front.jpg|thumb|400px|center|The Domino Club, San Francisco, Menu front, 1930s-1940s]] | |||
==See Also== | ==See Also== | ||
Revision as of 05:49, 15 August 2025
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Cartomancy in Art
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Moritz Calisch (1819-1870) 1856 Dutch,
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Albrecht Samuel Anker (1831-1910), also known as Albert Anker, was a Swiss painter and illustrator who specialized in genre paintings of his native country.
Edouard Bisson (1856-1945) was a French Pre-Rahaelite painter who specialized in wispy, romantic women; this painting is a bit more grounded than his usual offerins.
William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930) was a British artist best known as a portraitist in the 19th century Classical-Romantic style.
Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930) was a Spanish artist who also lived in Argentina.
The young woman on the right, in working-class dress with her legs folded, does not seem able – even by displaying the five of oros (a Spanish playing card) – to attract the attention of her companion, who is leaning back, her obviously melancholy expression suggesting some kind of anxiety over love.
Behind them lies Cordoba, here represented by the house and fountain of La Fuenseca, the Christ of the Lanterns and the Palace of the Marquis of La Fuensanta del Valle, where a woman in a red shawl leans against the doorjamb – a compositional resource used by the artist on several occasions after Lovesick (Cordoba Museum of Fine Arts) of around 1905.
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Harry Roseland's Cartomancer Series
I have collected a series of 14 paintings in which the black fortune teller is reading cards. The cards are a pack of ordinary playing cards, and the layout the reader uses seems most often to be three rows of five, a popular 19th century spread called The Fifteen Card Method.
It is obvious that this series was difficult for Harry Roseland to compose, due to the small size of the cards and their indistinct markings. Perhaps the most beautiful image is the 1898 paining "It's All in the Cards," in which the cards are seen very clearly against the black leather of the sofa, but this composition might be judged unsuccessful to the popular eye because the reader's back is turned to the viewer.
In 1899, a different painting from the same photo-shoot was released, titled "Reading the Cards," but although in this painting we can see the reader's face, it in the first in which the ungainly devise of the hat box lid was introduced as a reading surface. No real card reader would ever use a small, light-weight circular surface to read by the Fifteen Card Method, and all subsequent images in which the hat box lid appears are lacking in the naturalism for which Roseland was justly celebrated. Only a card-reader might pick up on the awkwardness, of course -- and to the public, these hat-box-lid scenes probably look just fine.
In his repeated attempts to capture the essence of the card readings, Roseland posed his subjects in a wide variety of seating arrangements, moving from the sofa to a table. The table was -- and remains -- the standard surface for card reading, but the angle was too tall for Roseland to clearly show the faces of the cards. He can only show the reader holding a card, never the full layout.
At this point he left the world of naturalism and began setting up paired chairs with a variety of stools between them on which a flat surface was laid for the card reading. In some cases he resorted to the awkward device of a lap-board.
The lid of the reader's hatbox, in which she keeps her knitting, provides an incredibly fragile and awkward reading surface; better is the wooden checkerboard. The latter may look like a random square of wood to a viewer unfamiliar with the other paintings Harry Roseland made of this family, but there are several in which the reader's husband and grandchildren play checkers on this same board.
Finally, as a last resort, he places the reader on the floor, in imitation of European "Gypsy card reading" paintings of his era. While the compsition is satisfactory, the reader must now employ the typical Gypsy arc-of-cards layout, whch was pretty obviously not this woman's chosen method. Not only that, seeing the reader, obviously an elderly lady with mobility issues, seated on the floor is a bit odd: you just know she would never have done that herself, and you can only imaging how her bones ached after taking that pose!
As with all of Harry Roseland's other paintings, titles were often re-used, especially when the images were to be printed in sets of six postcards, so i have given each image a unique descriptor. I have organized them roughly by location within the home, number of clients, and then chronologically.
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See Also
Cartomancy_Postcards_by_Fred_C._Lounsbury
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catherine yronwode
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