playing cards deck box and card stack floral pattern John Derian

playing cards diamond suit full spread antique transformation illustration John Derian

playing cards club suit spread antique transformation illustration John Derian

playing cards spade suit court cards antique transformation illustration John Derian

playing cards heart suit court cards antique transformation illustration John Derian

playing cards club suit spread with packaging box antique illustration John Derian

playing cards jokers and floral patterned box John Derian souvenir playing cards

John Derian

Playing Cards

Name: Playing Cards
Brand: John Derian
SKU: playing-cards
Price: 22.00 USD
Availability: OutOfStock

$22 USD

Or 4 payments from

$5.50 USD

Each suit in this deck carries its own cast: spades in armour and warrior dress, hearts as cherubs and fairies, diamonds as huntsmen and kings, clubs in peasant dress and military uniform. Reproduced from a 19th-century Jeanne Hachette deck originally printed by Grimaud around 1870, the cards have been updated by John Derian with two jokers and modern corner indices, and printed in the USA.

The numbered cards carry the detail further, working each suit's own shape into small figural scenes, a French "transformation" style used throughout the deck. Suited to an evening at the card table as much as a shelf of its own, it plays as a standard deck of 52 plus two jokers, pairing the antique illustrations with the everyday practicality of an ordinary deck of cards.

Dimensions: 8.9 × 6.4 cm.

Printed card stock. Made in the USA.

ABOUT the MAKER

John Derian

Since 1989, John Derian has worked from a single New York studio, turning the technique of decoupage into a signature practice of its own. Each object begins with a print pulled from his archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations: botanical studies, maritime scenes, playing cards, birds, and fragments of natural history. Trained artisans cut the images by hand, layer them beneath hand-blown glass, and seal them so the paper becomes part of the object itself, not simply applied to its surface. The result sits somewhere between a functional object and a small work of art: a paperweight, a desk cup, a cake pedestal, a tray. We carry the collection at Tessuti because each piece holds its history openly. The prints are old, the glass is blown by hand, and no two pieces are ever quite identical, so what arrives on a shelf or a desk carries a little of the studio it came from. These are pieces meant to be used and lived with rather than kept for display alone, gathering the marks of everyday life the way any well-loved object does over time.

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