Category Archives: Drawings and original artwork

Made by a Child: A Deck of Cards ca. 1790 Illustrated with Characters from Famous Plays

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Strange things are shelved in the Cotsen manuscripts section.  It’s unclear what  exactly they are, why they were made, and who made them.   When the object has no obvious clues that might set off a chase, some of their secrets will always be impenetrable.  Others can be cracked with some research, like this set of illustrated cards drawn on the blanks of a standard set of playing cards. Most of them have a tab on the back so they can be stood up on a flat surface, suggesting that they are not intended to be dealt out to players of a game.  The primitive style of the artwork and awkward printing of the captions look like the work of a child.Two of the cards conveniently date them between 1760 and 1820, the reign of King George III.  Here he is, with his consort Charlotte.  They seem to be the only portraits of real people.Whoever made them was familiar with the cast list of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, pt. 1 because Falstaff’s gang is well represented.  The child maker also seems to have known other plays. To the right of plump Jack Falstaff is Sergeant Kite, a character in George Farquahar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer, which opened in Drury Lane in 1706 and was one of the most popular plays of the 1700s.  It opens with Sergeant Kite haranguing the crowd, trying to sign up recruits for the army:

If any gentlemen soldiers, or others, have a mind to serve Her Majesty, and pull down the French king; if any prentices have severe masters, any children have unnatural parents; if any servants have too little wages, or any husband too much wife; let them repair to the noble Sergeant Kite, at the Sign of the Raven, in this good town of Shrewsbury, and they shall receive present relief and entertainment.

These two cards represent the hero and one of the rivals for his affections from the stage or reading versions of Henry Fielding’s updated adventures of Tom Thumb, incredibly popular The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb (1731). Fielding’s satire on the abuses of language on the contemporary stage was probably of less interest to the card maker than the running joke about the impossibility of congress between the little fellow and his gigantic panting lady loves.

The presence of certain other characters is much less unexpected.  “Mother Midnight,” supposedly the midwife behind the magazine The Midwife (1751) was one of poet Christopher Smart’s alter egos.  In the satirical review Mother Midnight’s Oratory, he played her in drag, as well as singing, dancing, and collaborating on writing the buffoonery.  The famous comedian Samuel Foote was also involved and the drag role of Lady Pentweazel in his play Taste turns up in the deck.

King Arthur and Merlin make appearances.  As tempting as it is to jump to the conclusion the child was immersed in Arthurian legends, given all the characters from plays in the card set, it may be just as likely that the drawings were inspired by  John Dryden’s libretto for Henry Purcell’s opera 1691 opera King Arthur with a libretto by John Dryden, which had been revived  in different revised versionsin 1736, 1763, 1770, and 1784.The child’s imagination was so engaged with the popular culture of the day that it makes me wonder if the card maker was stage-struck or was a member of a play-going family.  Until the identities of the characters drawn are untangled, it’s easy to dismiss the deck of cards as a curiosity or an amusing example of children’s artwork and fail to recognize it can also serve as a window into the mentalities of late eighteenth century childhood.

Heads, Bodies, Legs: A Handmade Version of the Game from the Early 1800s

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From the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Heads, Bodies, Legs is a chain game for three, popular with children and adults (especially artists) that requires pencil and paper.   The group is supposed to produce a drawing together without any player seeing what the others have created. The first player takes a sheet of paper and draws a head and neck as detailed or simple as desired.  Player 1 folds down the paper so only a little of the drawing’s bottom can be seen.  Player 2 draws a body from the waist up consulting only his or her imagination, then folds the paper to cover his work.  The legs will be drawn by the last player.  Once the drawing is completed, the three players unfold the sheet to see what the figure looks like—the sillier or stranger, the better. The drawing on the left was made by artists James Guthrie, Edward Arthur Walton, and Joseph Crawhall, who frequently played the game the summer of 1879.

Also known as Picture Consequences, Heads, Bodies, Legs is played at children’s birthday celebrations or family parties.  This familiar game, which has no winners or losers, has been repackaged as a type of moveable book sometimes called a horizontal flap transformation.   The illustrator designs a series of figures to be printed on pages of cardboard, which are divided horizontally into three sections—the head on the upper third, the body on the middle, the legs on the lower.  The reader/player can make new figures by recombining any three sections into a different one.  The pages are frequently comb-bound to facilitate the process of mismatching the heads, bodies, and legs into peculiar people with unlikely physiques and gender-bending clothes, as in this double-page spread from Walter Trier’s 8192 Crazy People in One Book (London: Atrium, {ca. 1949] Cotsen 1605).  Mixing in characters famous in popular culture, caricatures, national, and racial stereotypes is also common. 

Text can added to the sections, as Helen Oxenbury did in 729 Puzzle People  (London: Methuen/Walker Books, c. 1980, Cotsen 26110), which provides a nonsensical scenario for every figure in the same spirit as Exquisite Corpse, a game the Surrealists found delectable.  This one on the left reads “All dressed up I waddle to build up my body.”

Before the twentieth century, what appear to be variant versions of Heads, Bodies, Legs turn up on the antiquarian market. Cotsen acquired a set ca. 1810  of 1 hat, 14 heads, 18 torsos, and 22 limbs drawn on heavy paper with watercolor washes, apparently drawn by one person.  It may have been made to be played as a parlor game, similar to one of a supplement to an old Boy’s  Own Paper around 1880. “Some Social Transformations” has nine figures on the sheet, each to be cut in thirds and the resulting strips mounted on card.  All the strips were to be shuffled, then dealt to the group.  Player one lays down a pair of legs, then player two a body, and player three the head.

The figures that can be created  from this early nineteenth century set’s selections of heads, bodies, and legs are not anywhere as wacky as the modern ones because both sexes were required to cover the legs most of the time!  The gentleman in the black breeches with red slashings is wearing Elizabethan fancy dress, but his companion’s clothing is a mystery to me. Below them is a figure assembled from man wearing in the turban, a torso of another declaiming from a book, and the skirt of a pigeon-toed girl. The same thing holds for Metamorphosesn fuer Kinder= Metamorphoses pour les enfans=Child’s metamorphosis=Metamorfosi per fanciullia, a set manufactured in Germany for distribution across Western Europe between 1815 and 1825 (Cotsen in process).  although we have to concede the possibility that it could have been as titillating even shocking–for people then to see girls in trousers or boys in dresses as it is for us to see a chinless man in a frilly fairy’s tutu and saggy black tights with holes.