August 2022

Since October last year I've had to part from rare antique, vintage and nonstandard modern decks. Of most of them I already had scans or they were presented somewhere on this site. So I can always revisit them.		But sometimes I don't have scans of the complete deck and when it's a special one I sneak it in. In one of the xpo's or in this spot. This month a deck which was mentioned in one of the Lockdown series.

Edouard Alexis Daveluy was born on May 31, 1812. In 1835 he came to Bruges to start a lithographic print shop. The Daveluy company became renowned for their so-called porcelain cards and has produced these cards until his son Viktor took over the business in 1866. But in February 1847 Daveluy registered a trade mark (déposé) for a wrapper of a special deck of cards and in October of that year he acquired a certificate (brevet) to produce playing cards by color print or chromolithography. So, although an exact date or year isn't known, it's likely that Daveluy began their playing card production in or not long after 1847. In 2004 the B.E.J.C. published an extensive book about the Daveluy family and their works. It was written by Alex Claes, Filip Cremers, Jan D'Hondt, Luc Biebouw and Yvette Smet. In the book 33 different decks are described. Some have only been published for a short while, but this deck here has seen several editions. I've shown a few of them as an extra to the first Lockdown series. This deck here is my earliest and dates from the 1850's.

	THE "JEU MOYEN AGE" DECK

It's one of the decks that were printed on porcelain card. Hence the bright white background within the gold coloured borders.

The "Moyen Age" deck derives its name from the medieval clothing, that the unnamed characters on the courts wear.

Above I've enlarged the middle circle of the AS, because of the spelling mistake. In French "cartes" is female and the correct adjective should be "brevetées".

	This was corrected in later editions.

Daveluy was the first to use different sceneries as background on the courts. This concept was soon copied by makers from Turnhout.

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