Bright, brilliant and gleaming. The Sun dances into the spotlight.
We based The Sun card on a theatrical costume worn by the Sun King himself.
As all the scenes in our deck take place in a theatrical setting there is a lot of scope for imagination and in The Sun card for our deck, we were able to let our vision take flight.
So this card, in The Bohemian Cats’ Theatre Tarot, features a costume based on a truly fantastical one worn by the French king, Louis XIV (1638 – 1715), also of course known as The Sun King . The costume represents Apollo, god of the Sun, and was worn by Louis in Ballet de la nuit, in 1653. It was quite a thrill to be able to interpret it in miniature.
You can see the gorgeous recreation that the V &A museum in London did of this costume. Ours, being cat-sized, is of course a little less detailed. However, we still felt it was important to make it in real silks and to use antique gold trimmings and antique accessories – they have a certain look that modern synthetics and plastics just can’t match.
Our first step was to find suitable fabric. We have a very large collection of new and old fabrics and for The Bohemian Cats we mostly use real silks and sometimes dye them as necessary.
For this costume, then, we decided on a very special gold shantung silk that we bought on the roll from England a few years ago. It has the colour, smooth texture and sheen that we were looking for. It is also strong enough for us to use in our embroidery machine – crucial as embroidery is such a major part of this costume.
The underskirt is made from vintage silk satin that we sourced – appropriately for a nod to the Sun King! – in France. It is richly coloured and hangs beautifully.
The antique gold metallic trimmings are from central Europe – we have quite a collection as we became aware of this type of trimming – it was originally mostly used for ecclesiastical garments – when we lived in Prague. We used to find gorgeous pieces of it in bazaars.
We used an antique gold ribbon from the same source to make the lovely little rosettes worn on the knees (actually, cats have a condylar joint like a knee rather than the kind of knee that humans have – so now you know!)
The headdress was more of a challenge. We eventually found an antique brass piece that would originally have been a halo on the figure of a saint – again, it’s French, so that was quite serendipitous.
When we put the image together for the final illustration we emphasised the gleaming gold colours of the costume and added a backdrop of a castle – the walls shine in the sunlight.
The sunflower that our Sun cat holds is a nod to the original RWS card, in which sunflowers feature in the background. If you know our decks, you will be familiar with the fact that we often include some detailed visual references to the RWS – you may enjoy spotting them!
As ever, we designed the embroidery ourselves and stitched it in the studio using our in-studio embroidery machine. This short reel shows some of the process.
We’ve used embroidery on so many costumes, and this one was particularly satisfying as it came out so beautifully.
You can see more of the Majors for The Bohemian Cats’ Theatre Tarot in our other posts. Here are just a few in no particular order – Justice, The Chariot, The Fool, Strength and Temperance.
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