1926 Oswald Wirth Tarot Pictures in High Resolution

http://sumada.multiply.com/photos/album/97#

Enjoy these too!

Just click on "Slideshow" to see them as large as the Multiply mechanism will allow. They are in fact as large as Kenji's fabulous 1889 deck scans.

Simply amazing.

Look much prettier than my actual deck (which isn't this really old one)

lovely. I wrote a review of the reproduction deck with scans, but it hasn't appeared here yet.

Thanks


Freddie

Hi Sumada,

Thanks again for your uploading the wonderful pictures

Now I feel that the plates I have, with softer colours and a bit cruder golden 'ideograms' on the background, are the earlier version. (LE BATELEUR looks to his right.)

It seems they were refined afterwards, with more vibrant colours and more precise ideograms. (In this version LE BATELEUR looks straight to us somehow.) You know, your deck appears to be more similar to this version, so I think your deck was modeled on it. And obviously the repro deck by Editions de l'Aigle is also based on this later version. (Or rather on the deck you have?).

And I suspect your deck was made round 1930s, more precisely, between 1931 - 1943.
In Wirth's book "Introduction a l'étude du Tarot", published in 1931, there is no mention about the actual deck/cards -- but only about "Planches".
(According to this book it seems the plates were also sold separately from his 1927 book. The advertisement says, 'Les planches séparément: 30 francs.')
And judging from Wirth's signature your deck has, it should have been published before 1943, when he died.

I will attach an image of the same deck, which is in Mr Yasuhiko Hirota's collection.

Hi Kenji,

And great thanks to you too, fascinating info as always.

I see what you mean about the eyes between those two different versions. I rather like the version with softer colouring, but I don't find the "golden ideograms", (early Phoenician eqivalents of the Hebrew letters) so much as "crude"; but they, and the solid gold background, have certainly been printed out of register.

I also note that your Bateleur "with more vibrant colours and more precise ideograms" (shall we call it version 2?), has an impressiion of the type from the reverse of the title page apparent in the gold background; just like mine.

The front page of the folder that came with my plates (version 2), is however dated 1926, and my cards are identicle to these images in every respect. It is as if actual examples of the plates were simply glued on to pale blue card and cut out, which could of course have been done at any stage in the years that followed. Interesting that the 1889 deck also had pale blue backs, Oswald must have liked them that way.