Castles from Playing Cards

Three construction methods from the 18th Century

As far as I know, the earliest mention of the construction of Card Castles appears in an entry for 6th October 1606 in the journal of Jean Heroard, who was the personal doctor of the young Louis XIII. The relevant part of the entry reads 'il s'amuse a faire des chateaux de cartes', in English, 'he amused himself making card castles'.

I’m sure you will remember from your childhood that there are several methods of building Card Castles (some more prone to sudden collapse than others) but unfortunately this passage does not tell us which method (or methods) Louis XIII used.

The ones I remember from my own, somewhat less than Royal, childhood, are the pyramid method, where cards are leaned delicately against each other in successively higher levels, and the tower method where the castle is really just a single turret and nothing more.

The earliest evidence we have for the tower method is this engraving by Francois Joullain after Charles Antoine Coypel. A card at the lower left bears the words 'Car Coypel 1725', thus giving us the date of the original painting, which appears to have been lost. (The tower has not grown very high in this instance and I’m sure you could do better.)

The pyramid method is evidenced only a few years later in a painting by William Hogarth, which can be dated to 1730.

At this date playing cards, I suspect, were quite expensive items, and probably only quite rich parents would allow children to play with them. But at least in these pictures the cards remain undamaged. That is not true of a third method of building Card Castles, which I call the column method, which requires that the cards, or at least some of them, be folded in half. This method is shown in the engraving below, which can be dated to 1744. It was made by Jean Michel Liotard after Francois Boucher and comes from the collection of the British Museum. I have a feeling that the dog is bored and may be intervening soon.

This method is also pictured, although less clearly, in a print by Pierre Alexandre Aveline taken from a famous painting by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, which can be dated from a few years earlier, to c1735/7. The painting seems to show a boy randomly arranging folded playing cards on a table, with no hint of what he is trying to achieve, but the title of the print makes it clear that he is setting out a foundation for a Card Castle.

In about 1740 Jonathan Tyers, the owner of the then fashionable promenade of Vauxhall Gardens, on the South bank of the River Thames in London, decided that displaying works of art in his supper boxes (presumably open-sided rooms where fashionable people could dine in the evenings) could help him attract more visitors. Among the ‘conversation pieces’ hung in these boxes was a painting by Hubert-François Gravelot titled 'Building Houses of Cards'. The adults in this painting are, rather unsuccessfully, attempting to build a card castle using the tower method. The children, on the smaller table, are building a second card castle using the column method. The details are easier to see in a print of the painting made by Lauren Truchy in 1743.

The column method does not feature in my childhood memories, and seems largely to have been forgotten, perhaps because folding the cards in half removes (at least some of) their utility as playing cards.

As paperfolders, we do not often think of folding as being a process that damages the paper, but it is. Perhaps that is one reason why I am drawn to minimalism. The fewer creases that are used, the more of the original surface of the paper that is left undamaged.