Victorian Romantic Tarot
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[edit] Description
The Victorian Romantic Tarot, based on original nineteenth century engravings from European and American artists.
[edit] Creator(s)
Karen Mahony and Alex Ukolov
[edit] Publishing details
ISBN 1905572026 (kit of deck and book) ISBN 1905572034 (deck with short booklet)
[edit] Date of Publication
Autumn 2006
[edit] Publisher
Magic Realist Press
[edit] Deck creation and/or publication process
See Creators' comments.
[edit] Creators' comments
Based on an extensive collection of Victorian engravings, many of which are now very rare. The deck is collaged, but the aim is that this will be so seamless that the illustrations will look completely coherent, not like classic collaged images. We colour the pictures in a water-colour style in keeping with work of this period. The cards range in style from Victorian Classicism to early Pre-Raphaelite, but this is very much a "Victorian salon" deck of work done by painters who specialised in nineteenth century realism. It's unusual in including much work by Victorian women painters, many of whom were very successful in their day but have since, sadly, been forgotten. See, for example, the splendidly seductive Devil based on an engraving from a painting by Georges Achille-Fould, daughter of the famous French banker and financier.
What began as a somewhat light and pretty deck, has developed into an obsession and become much more substantial than we expected. We'd now like this to be an exceptionally strong reading deck - and so far it's full of many of the interestingly conflicting nuances of the Victorian era. ("Victorian" of course being a misnomer for European and US artwork, but we use the term as it's so well understood).
The process of making it has been rather different from our other decks, because it's required a great deal of work in researching and sourcing the images. They are not from copyright-free or library sources, we've actually tracked down certain publications of the time - mostly German and British - that had exceptionally high-quality engravings (some were, we suppose, "limited edition" in their time and were probably bought on subscription). Perhaps as much as 30% of the time spent on this deck has been taken up with image sourcing - we have spent many happy hours in extremely dusty antiquarian bookshops all over Prague, but we've also had many books shipped from Germany, where some exceptional quality was produced by Berlin-based publishers.
As far as choosing and altering the images is concerned, there have been some interesting issues of consistency - the nineteenth century was a time in which many art styles existed. We've also had to think hard about the extent to which we follow RWS imagery (the deck follows the RWS structure) or diverge from it. An unexpectedly demanding project - which has left us with a great deal of admiration for the sheer technical skill of a lot of these artists.
The image on the right hand side is fairly typical of our source material. It's by a Czech artist [ed: more details to follow] and shows a sleep-walking girl wandering on the rooftops of an obviously Central European city. It's from an edition of Zlata Praha ("Golden Prague") which was one of the most adventurous and highly-regarded European art journals of its time.
