Tarot of the Masters Deck

“Tarot of the Masters is my new favorite deck.  Not only does the choice of art wonderfully fit the Rider-Waite-Smith images we all know, James Ricklef has smartly decided to redraw them in his own hand rather than simply collage them.  The result is a unified deck with wonderful colors and exciting scenes. Because the paintings are themselves so interesting they add extra layers of story — and therefore meaning — to the classic cards.”
— Rachel Pollack

Update (November 2016) —This deck is now out of print. My thanks to everyone who has purchased this limited edition deck and made it a success.

About the deck:

The cards in my new “Tarot of the Masters” deck were inspired by classic paintings by old masters, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Bouguereau, Rubens, and Hieronymus Bosch.

In preparation for creating this deck, I perused hundreds of paintings (and quite a few statues as well) in order to find ones that would suit the 78 cards of the Tarot.  The classic works of art that I found in this process have inspired my own illustrations for the cards.  (In a few cases I have combined two different paintings. For example, the Judgement card, which combines Blake’s “Ancient of Days” with Leighton’s painting titled “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it”)

YouTube videos:
I have created videos of this deck for you to see the cards:
Major Arcana video
Minor (numbered) cards
Minor (court) cards

Reviews:

You can read a review of this deck on Aeclectic.com and Bonnie Cehovet has written a short review of the accompanying book, Uncovering the Tarot of the Masters.

Testimonials:

I can not recall the last time that I found a new deck design as easy to use and responsive as this one. — Sean

I just got the Tarot of the Masters companion book.  It blasted the deck to another galaxy! Great reading! — Jani

This extraordinary deck is my new favorite Tarot. The on-line depictions of the cards do not even come close to showing how vibrant and creative they are. The changes of depth in the coloration, the variation between flat fill and texture fill, the perspective depth versus 2D outlines. I am totally impressed! — Ferol

I just started working with your deck in earnest and it is even more amazing than I had realized! The back story of the artwork used adds so much to the meaning of the cards. — Vicki

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