"House of Cards is another work based on a very traditional still life motif, and is also closely related to the ideas of transience and loss in my vanitas paintings, like Coffee and Cigarette. Chardin painted houses of cards in the mid-eighteenth century, and they have been interpreted as comments on the brevity of youth, on ideas of subjective interiority and perception, or on the space of painting. My house of cards is about all of those things; surface and space, about reading, visibility and invisibility, and about fragility and tactility. These cards are actually very small cards for playing Patience that once belonged to my grandmother."

Anthony Springford