Treasures of Commissioner’s House: Playing Card
Treasures of Commissioner’s House: Playing Card
While Commissioner’s House undergoes an extensive renovation project, the team is finding some long-forgotten items and treasures. In this blog, we are focusing on a historic playing card that has been discovered. The previous blog covers historic wallpaper.
Conservator, Alex, details why this playing card is such an interesting find.
Discoveries in The House
Imagine, you’re standing in the Commissioner’s House, the wooden planks of the original floor have been lifted. You have a look in the small space underneath, and you find a small square of card. You take it out, and turn it over, and you uncover a beautiful playing card that’s lain in the dark waiting to be found for over 200 years. This is the exciting find that one of our House Restoration Team discovered underneath the first floor.
After careful bagging and tagging the card, it was handed to the Collections Team for conservation and analysis.
Worshipful Company of Playing Card Makers
We reached out to our friends at the Worshipful Company of Playing Card Makers for help in ID’ing and aging the piece. A Livery Company of the City of London the Playing Card Makers “was awarded its Royal Charter in 1670, but the Company is first recorded as a trade association for the makers of pattens in 1379.” [1] They hold their own large collection of cards and provide insight and expertise on a huge range of card from across the world.
They were kind enough to provide us with an extensive report that we can add to our archive catalogue record. This Jack of Spades is dated between 1725 – 1750. The Commissioner in the House at the time would have been Commissioner Thomas Kempthorne (1722-36). The card is made up of three layers of paper which can just about be made out in the bottom right-hand corner. As card was useful in itself, surviving card were kept because the card material itself was useful. Cards of this period would have been printed with wood blocks in layers, for example the black layer would have been printed first and then the colour laid in a second print over the top. You can see that the red layer is slightly out of line with the black which is typical of the woodblock printing style.
About the Card
This card is particularly special. As mentioned above cards were often kept and reused, we’re not sure what the secondary use for this card is but we can see that it has cut corners, which is common for playing cards. The corners would be cut off when they began to wear down. What is unusual is the straight, deliberate cuts along the top edge, under magnification we can see that there are tiny pieces of feather embedded in the cuts. The curve of the card suggests that it was held in the hand and pressure applied somewhere towards those top cuts. It’s possible this could have been used as a brush of some sort, what do you think it’s secondary use was?
Now that we know that the shape of the card and the cuts to it are fundamental to the provenance of the card it was decided that our conservator would carefully dry clean the piece. We didn’t want to completely flatten and repair the piece because it would loose its historical context, this meant it needed a thick mount to sit in. The highest part of the curve was measured with callipers and then a built-up mount was made from archival board, archival foam, a sheet of Tyvek and a cover of acid free paper.
We hope to have more exciting updates about our wonderful finds soon. Follow along with our social media channels to make sure you’re up to date on all things Commissioner’s House.
[1] https://www.pattenmakers.co.uk/
