Playing Card Figures from a set of watercoloured drawings by Adolf Iosifovich Charlemagne, a Russian painter of historical and battle scenes, 1862. All the court cards wear medieval costumes, so the pack is often called “in the style of Renaissance”. A major innovation was that the faces acquired distinguishable emotiveness, thoughts and feelings peculiar to each portrait.
These 1862 sketches were not accepted by the management of the Card Factory at the Imperial Educational House, so they were NEVER printed by the Imperial playing card factory. However, in 2018 the Russian Playing Card Society, together with Makwell, published an enhanced version based on Charlemagne’s sketches, with the addition of 2 jokers, a background pattern, elaborate indices and sparkling gold foil.
A limited Edition set of the Gold Gilded Decks were created with Blue Wooded Boxes, a Maxwell Metal Emblem and a Number sticker to identify the deck number out of 100 Limited Series gold-gilded decks in a sealed blue box.
