A Question to the Cards

A Question to the Cards

In Édouard Bisson’s “A Question to the Cards” (1889), we find a different scene entirely. Two wealthy, fashionable young women, surrounded by rich furnishings, appear to be reading a deck of cards. Here, cartomancy has become a fashionable entertainment. In Hanfstaengl’s “The Teller,” we might easily imagine the class of women that were heavily policed and punished as charlatans and rogues under the vagrancy acts. Yet with Bisson, we see how, for the middle- and upper-classes similar ‘divination’ activities were read and seen as mere leisurely distraction or as party games.

Bisson, Édouard

The Athenaeum- Private Collection

1889

Private collection

Height: 81 cm (31.89 in.), Width: 65 cm (25.59 in.)

Painting - oil on canvas