The Conver Tarot de Marseille

Nicolas Conver received his mastership as a cardmaker in Marseille in 1760, and the woodblocks cut in his shop that year became the most consequential in the history of tarot. They print a Tarot de Marseille of the kind scholars call Type II: Justice at VIII, La Force at XI, the Popess with her book, the unnamed card XIII swinging its scythe. Conver did not invent the pattern; Marseille shops had been printing it for a century. His blocks are simply the ones history kept. The firm that carried his name went on printing from them for decades, and this deck is one of those printings.

This copy was pulled from the original blocks between about 1809 and 1833, then colored by stencil in red, blue, gold and flesh pink. Each of the 78 cards measures 11.9 by 6.2 centimeters, with a dotted blue back. The two of deniers carries the shop's signboard, the date 1760 and the Conver name on a looping ribbon, and the valet de bâton has FRANCE and the maker's name lettered up its edges. The deck came to the Bibliothèque nationale de France with the collection of Paul Marteau.

Marteau is the reason this deck matters beyond Marseille. As head of the Grimaud card house he based his 1930 Ancien Tarot de Marseille on a Conver deck, and that mass-printed pack fixed both the look and the name of the Tarot de Marseille for the twentieth century. When later restorers wanted something closer to the wood, they went back to Conver too: Camoin and Jodorowsky's 1997 restoration, Yoav Ben-Dov's CBD deck, and most modern Marseille editions stand on these blocks. All 78 cards survive here, faces and backs both, scanned by the BnF.

If this page feels like a repeat of the Jean Dodal Tarot, that is the pattern working as intended. The Marseille tarot was a fixed iconography that workshops reproduced as exactly as their engravers could manage; novelty in the images would have made the cards harder to sell, not easier. Conver's blocks sit on the Type II branch, a quieter, steadier revision of the images the Type I decks of Noblet and Dodal carry, with the wandering title spellings settled into regular French. Same deck, two generations of polish. The differences are for connoisseurs; the sameness is the history.