Cartomancy in Art
My Patreon supporters paid for this page and had access to it one full year before the public did.
- Patreon Release Date: August 14th, 2025.
- Public Release Date: August 14th, 2026.
Please tell your friends that they can subscribe to my Patreon stream for $8.00 per month:
Patrons: To discuss this and other Patreon pages with me, join my private Patreon Forum:
Cartomancy in Art
If these painting were hung in a museum, they would fill two large galleries. We will view them in roughly chronological sequence, and in the process we will cover 100 years of card readers in art.
Marie Adelaide (Adele) Kindt (16 December 1804 - 8 May 1893) was a Belgian artist who painted historical subjects, portraits, and genre subjects. This image, from 1835, is quite vivid and almost modern in style.
Aleksei Venetsianov (18 February 1780 - 16 December 1847) was a Russian painter of Greek descent, whose surname translates as "Venetian." He painted peasants and ordinary people, and taught painting to the poor, and was eventually rewarded by being appointed a court painter to Tsar Nicholas I. If you think that reading cards on a pillow in 1842 looks awkward, keep scrolling, and wait for the hat-box in 1908.
Moritz Calisch (12 April 1819 - 13 March 1870), was a Jewish painter who was born and lived in Amsterdam, in the Northern Netherlands. He painted portraits in the Jewish community and historical works in the romantic style. This image, from 1856, is unusual in that a man is attending his wife's card reading, accompanied by his dog. The woman appears to be in the early stages of pregnancy, and we hope the news is good, despite the fact that the five of hearts (a marriage, a happy union) has fallen to the floor.
Ernst Hanfstaengl (30 March 1840 - 20 February 1897) was born in Dresden, Germany. He painted genre subjects and travel landscapes, as far away as Sicily. He died on the Isle of Capri, in Italy. This painting, from 1871 introduces what would later become a trope in many fortune teller paintings -- the wealthy woman with a parasol consulting a humble, older reader in her home.
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. Here we have what may be a mother and daughter consulting the card reader in 1880.
William Cameron Coup (1857 - 1895) operated a large circus, the New United Monster Shows, throughout the American Midwest and East Coast in the 1880s. His troupe featured acrobats, aerialists, and a menagerie of exotic animals, as well as the $50,000 Broncho Horses in their Great Military Drill and Marvelous Evolutions; Madame Georgiana, the Iron Jaw Woman; Amos' Colored Jubilee Band; the Jacketsch Imperial Japanese Troupe; Menter's Silver Cornet Band; Prof. Haskins' Punch and Judy; Stone's Troupe of Iroquois and Comanche Indians; Walter Stewart, the Armless and Legless Wonder; Prof. Lorento, Magician; the Belmont Family of Bell-Ringers; Prof. Fryer's Performing Dogs; Flora, the Ascensionist; and Wiano and Pluto, the Wild Men of Borneo. The artist who illustrated this large souvenir trade card is not known, but the image is startling in the sense of chilling hostility it conveys between the card reader and her client.
I have been unable to find any information on this painter, whose signature looks to be "J. Klar," and seems to be written in a German-style script. The painting appeared in the catalogue of a Florida gallery in 2019 and was simply said to be of 19th century European provenance.
Edouard Bisson (1856-1945) was a French Pre-Raphaelite painter who specialized in wispy, romantic women; this painting is a bit more grounded than his usual offerings.
William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930) was a British artist best known as a portraitist in the 19th century Classical-Romantic style, and this painting, from 1899, brings us to a a wide doorway that leads into the 20th century.
Interlude: Harry Roseland's Cartomancer Series, 1898-1923
As we reach the end of the 19th century, it is time to take a side-tour into the cartomantic paintings of Harry Herman Roseland (c.1967 - 12 December, 1950), the self-taught Brooklyn, New York based painter who produced a phenomenal number of genre paintings featuring poor African Americans. These paintings were so popular that they appeared on postacrds, calendars, and even jigsaw puzzles. Roseland also created copies of his most popular pieces for individual buyers, which is why many of them appear to be variations of one another. Although Roseland's total output of domestic subject matter is varied, quite a few of his paintings feature a black fortune teller who read tea leaves, consulted a crystal ball, and was a palmist as well. My entire collection of Roseland's fortune telling paintings fills its own web page; here i have selected only the series of 15 images in which the black fortune teller is reading cards. 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 organized then chronologically, as best i can. Some of the images are smaller than the others because those are the only copies i have been able to find on the internet.
It is obvious that this series of cartomancy paintings 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 the composition might be judged unsuccessful to the popular eye because the reader's back is turned to the viewer. The cards are a pack of ordinary playing cards, and the layout the reader uses seems to be three rows of five, a popular 19th century spread called The Fifteen Card Method. Notice the little ball of knitting yarn n the floor in the foreground. We will see it again.
Roseland took photographs as reference for his paintings, and he cut-and collaged them to create variant compositions, In 1899, a different painting derived from the earliest photo-shoot was released, titled "Reading the Cards." The reader and sitter are still situated on the sofa, but although in this image we can see the reader's face, it in the first in which the ungainly device of the hat-box lid was introduced as a card-reading surface. The hat-box, with its floral wallpaper covering, has been repurposed for yardn storage, and it is the source of the little balls of knitting yarn which appear on the floor in many images of this series.
The couch is still the place for the readings in this undated painting, in which the cartomancer interprets the cards for two sitters. Again the cards are arrayed on the top of the hat-box. 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.
In his repeated attempts to capture the essence of the card readings, Roseland posed his subjects in a wide variety of seating arrangements. He now moves both reader and sitter from the sofa to a kitchen table.
The table was -- and remains -- the standard surface for card reading, but the angle of view 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. The table was also used, with much more attention to detail, as the place where a series of tea leaf reading paintings was situated.
At this point, in 1903, Roseland 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 hat-box, in which she keeps her knitting, provides an incredibly fragile and awkward reading surface; better is the wooden checkerboard box. 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, in 1904, as a last resort, Roseland placed the reader on the floor, in reflection of European "Gypsy card reading" paintings and photographs. (See, for instance, the Mystery Magazine from 1926 below). While the composition is satisfactory, the reader must now employ the typical Gypsy arc-of-cards layout, which 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 imagine how her bones ached after taking that pose!
And now, a return to the hat-box -- the whole thing, not just the lid -- and for good measure, it had been placed atop a wooden step-stool. This painting is unsigned and square in form, 11 1/2" x 11 1/2" -- and again we see the strange use of the hat-box lid for card reading. This was designed to be a 1908 calendar print for McCormick farm implements, hence the square format; see a fuller version of the calendar below.
Here is the actual McCormick calendar for April 1908, a bit tattered and torn, but still in one piece. This print shows more of the painting, all around the edges.
Now the hat-box is placed on top of a carved wooden foot-stool. The anomaly of formal furniture and an impromptu chipboard hat-box lid card-reading surface is disruptive, in my opinion.
The reader and sitter are on the sofa, and again the cards are on the intrusive hat-box lid. Although painted in 1910, this image uses elements from the photo-shoot of 1898.
Only a card-reader might pick up on the awkwardness of reading cards on a hat-box lid -- so to the public, these hat-box-lid scenes probably look just fine. I flinch a little when i see them; i can feel how unstable the set-up would be -- so easy to tip it over and send the cards flying to the floor.
Although it is undated, i think this painting was made between 1920 and 1923, when the last one in the series was dated. We now have the reader doing a twelve-card reading, in three rows of four. The hat box has been better days, and the lid has gone missing entirely.
It's 1923, and the four-legged stool has now been topped with the wooden checkerboard box. The hat-box is gone. There are cards falling onto the floor, as i predicted they would. And thus we come to the end of Harry Roseland's Cartomancer series.
And Back to the Main Gallery
Having followed Harry Roseland's cartomancer for 25 years, from 1898 to 1923, we now return to the main gallery, in 1922.
Julio Romero de Torres (9 November 1874 - 10 May 1930) was a Spanish artist who also lived in Argentina. This picture, in the symbolist style tells an interesting story. The card reader on the right holds up the five of coins, but the sitter, at left, turns away, looking sad and distracted by her inner emotions. Behind them we see the reason: in Cordoba, Spain, by the house and fountain of La Fuenseca, theChrist of the Lanterns and the Palace of the Marquis of La Fuensanta del Valle, a woman dressed in red leans against the doorjamb – a copy of the artist's own 1905 paining Lovesickness. In the streets, a disheveled and distraught woman runs after a man, who escapes her attempts to catch him. It is these scenes, played out in memory, which trouble the cartomancer's client.
The artist who painted the cover for the April 15, 1926 cover of Mystery Magazine seems to have signed the work with the block initials NS. =Here we see the traditional Romany reder, on the ground, her cards on a blanket or shawl.
I have no idea what this painting of Romany Good Advice was used for or who painted it, but it is charming piece of 1930s commercial art.
See Also
Cartomancy_Postcards_by_Fred_C._Lounsbury
To Discuss This Patreon Page
This Patreon Bonus Page is part of the series titled "Your Wate and Fate." To discuss it with me and the Patreon community, please visit our Private Patreon Forum at
http://forum.luckymojo.com/your-wate-and-fate-t93995.html
Thank you.
catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
Your Wate and Fate
Special thanks to my dear husband and creative partner nagasiva yronwode for illustrations, scans, and clean-ups.