Jeu Grotesque

Edizioni del Solleone
di Vito Arienti

Another in the set of period reproductions by Vito Arienti, the Jeu Grotesque is a collection of two-sided drawings. The face cards are all reversible vertically, so that you see a different picture at each orientation. The number cards are just caricatures of pairs of people joined together at the back. I wish I knew more about the deck, so I could say whether these are caricatures of specific people, or just caricatures of common stereotypes in France just after the Revolution. However, from Hargrave's "A History of Playing Cards:"

"There is also a series of leger-de-main cards of the early nineteenth century, but, in spite of their beautiful coloring, they hold none of the charm of the early cards. The cards in the latter series are completely taken up with grotesque figures having enormous heads and two faces. Still another series of about this time are great grotesque heads, facing both ways, and which may be looked at either way, from either end of the card. Later in the century this same idea was used, and the cards were called 'Binettes.'"

So this deck would seem to be either a specific deck which incorporated both motifs mentioned above, or a composite deck perhaps containing cards from more than one deck. Either way, I wouldn't be as harsh as Ms. Hargrave, but I couldn't call them beautiful either: curiosities seems to work best.

Like the Jeu de Drapeaux, the cards are hand-cut (and show ragged edges), there is no design on the back, and contains only thirty two cards and no jokers, being a Piquet deck. I was at first quite puzzled about the fact that there are only 32 cards in the deck (as with the Jeu de Drapeaux), but after I put up the page, Bob Lancaster set me straight about Piquet. In his own words:

The reason the decks contain only 32 cards is that they are "piquet" decks. Piquet is a card game which uses only the ace and six through king of each suit. "At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the sixes were also left out, so that today a piquet pack has only 32 cards" (from Hargrave's A History of Playing Cards).

Each deck is numbered, one of a limited edition of 1000 decks. The whole series must be something to behold (the Jeu de Drapeaux was number 17 in the series, though the Jeu Grotesque wasn't numbered in that way), and would be a delightful addition to my collection. Of course, at $18US apiece, it would be a lot to drop at once.