Jean Galler Tarot

Description

Jean Galler Tarot / TSR018 / Digital Print

Number of cards: 78
Card size: 12 × 7 cm
Packaging: handmade envelope with hand-painted design (verge paper 160 gr)

First limited edition. Each deck is numbered and signed on an additional card.

Shipping expected mid-April 2026.

The Jean-Baptiste Galler workshop

The name of Jean-Baptiste Galler appears in archival records between 1738 and 1760.
In January 1751 he was admitted to the guild of mercers, a status required to manufacture and trade playing cards in Brussels. In 1759 his establishment received the title of manufacture impériale et royale.

Administrative records give a sense of the scale of the business. In 1751 Galler used around eight hundred and sixty reams of paper from Dinant and more than twelve hundred reams of local paper to produce several hundred grosses of playing cards. A few years later the Galler brothers reported employing twenty-four to twenty-five workers, while noting that the workshop could have occupied nearly sixty had paper supplies been sufficient.

These figures place the Galler workshop among the important cardmaking establishments active in Brussels during the eighteenth century.

The “Brussels” tarot

During the eighteenth century a distinctive pattern of tarot was produced in Brussels, Bouvignes, Dinant and Liège — what historians now often describe as the Belgian tarot.

One of its most striking characteristics is the replacement of two canonical figures of the Tarot de Marseille. Trump II becomes Capitano Eracasse (the Spanish Captain), while Bacus replaces the Pope.

Earlier echoes of this tradition can already be seen in the Paris tarot of Jacques Vieville (c.1650), although that deck still lacks the figures of Capitano Eracasse and Bacus and retains different suit designs.

The Galler tarot belongs to this constellation, alongside related productions such as the Liège tarot of Gérard Bodet and the Rouen tarot of Adam C. de Hautot. Together they reveal a regional lineage that developed alongside the better-known Marseille tradition.

Bringing the Galler back to life

Work on the present edition began in June 2017, when I first met the Jean Galler Tarot in person and assembled the initial material to start my redrawing process. It felt it was the good moment to bring it to existance among the Tarot Sheet Revival Belgian Tarot Series.

The edition is based primarily on two particularly well-preserved packs held at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), complemented where necessary by the example preserved at the Columbia University Libraries.

The card backs reproduce one of the original Brussels patterns, alternating radiant suns and four-pointed stars in a repeating field — a striking design rarely encountered in eighteenth-century tarot cards.

For this edition the entire deck has been carefully redrawn. The linework was reconstructed card by card, while the textures were sampled directly from the original cards. The aim was not to reinterpret the images, but to rebuild them as a coherent whole — allowing the historical deck to exist again as a working pack.

When you purchase the Jean Galler Tarot (limited edition), you will receive:

• A true-to-life version of the Jean Galler Tarot, achieved through a process of digital recomposition of the full redrawing of the deck and the colouring out of sampled textures from the original deck, to idealy recreate techniques used by the master card maker.
• Handmade packaging inspired by traditional cardmaker envelopes, hand-painted in four colours
• High-quality printing on double-sided graphic cardstock prepared on both faces. Printed locally, with love and expertise.
• A limited-edition deck, numbered and signed on an additional card

Be among the first to bring the Jean Galler Tarot back into circulation — from Belgium to readers and collectors around the world.

Shipping expected mid-April 2026.