Chinese Costumes

The Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum

This deck hails from the Winterthur Museum, which houses the collection of Henry Francis du Pont, reknowned art collector and horticulturist. On a sprawling estate in Delaware (USA), one can find the Winterthur Gardens, Library and the Museum, which contains an impressive collection of decorative arts from throughout the world - "a dazzling array of more than 89,000 objects that includes furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver and other metals, architectural elements, tools, needlework, prints, and paintings. No other collection of American antiques approaches the quality, variety, and depth represented at Winterthur." [From their web page.]

This deck has some explanatory notes printed on three cards, which act as an introduction to eighteenth century official Chinese costume, and to the deck itself. I can hardly do better than to quote the original.

Chinese court costumes reflect the strong traditions of an ancient culture and eloquently illustrate the Chinese people's interest in fine clothes, ceremony and pageantry.

The motifs found on Chinese costumes were used on all forms of decorative arts. These motifs carried a sophisticated symbolism in addition to denoting rank. Each color was associated with an element, a season, a direction, and an animal. Numbers were also symbolic. Rebuses or a combination of symbols were used to convey more abstract or complex ideas.

[...]By the eighteenth century, laws were issued specifying cut, color, and design of the robes for each official rank.[...]

The characters depicted on these decks of playing cards are adapted from four sources in Winterthur Museum's Collection of Printed Books. George Henry Mason's The Costume of China (London, 1800) and William Alexander's book of the same title (London, 1805) were both published to show Europeans how the Chinese looked and dressed.  Designs were also adapted from watercolors on rice paper, dated about 1800. The designs for the backs of the cards were taken from a Chinese lacquered screen made between 1800 and 1850 and displayed in Winterthur's China Trade Room.

There is a lot more information on the introductory cards than I have shown here, and it's an interesting look at an eastern aesthetic which is all but lost now, consigned to museum collections like these. In this deck, only the face cards have special designs on them, so I have not bothered to show any of the standard cards.

All images and quoted text © 1984 the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, presented here solely for analysis and appreciation.