When does someone starts being a collector ? Was it 10 years ago … or was it already when I was 10? 1999, the schoolyard experiences its first invasion of previously unknown creatures: the Pokémania has just started. If only I had known, while tossing the cards on the granite stairs… the visible marks of cards that have lived through it. I was lucky enough to have a cousin (almost a brother) who was the same age as me and who allowed me to immerse myself in the world of cards and video games from a very young age. It never really let me go …

My intention with this article is to celebrate the 30 years of Pokémon by launching a series exploring both the artists behind the cards and the subtle connections they maintain with art history. This series also aims to break down barriers between the arts, demystify the collector’s role, and offer new perspectives on an indeniable contemporary phenomena that have shaped our childhood as much as our adult lives. Because collecting is indeed child’s play, and the value of a work of art lies primarily in the emotion it evokes. It can be felt at the opening of an exhibition just as easily as when opening a booster pack… as you hold in your hands, a small piece of yourself. And as we all experience life now into the reflection of our smartphones, as much as Narcisse in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, I have decided to start this series with Ivysaur … bent over a pond, staring at his own face on the surface.

My first thought when I saw this card was that Ivysaur has taken over the myth of Narcissus, giving it a contemporary twist in the form of a, just as legendary, Japanese trading card. Has anyone asked for tis connection? Maybe not but I am doing it anyway because I like this kind of unexpected enconters.

Before diving deeper into Ivysaur’s reflecting pool, let’s make a quick refresher about Greek mythology. Echo was a nymph who used to speak a lot to distract Hera from the infidelities of Zeus. When Hera discovered the trick, she punished her: “you will always have the last word, but you will never speak first”. Echo could no longer speak except repeating other people’s last words back to them. When she saw Narcissus into the woods, she fell in love with him. He was a boy of incredible beauty who captivated all his suitors. He rejected Echo with a contempt that drove her to despair. To avenge her honor, the other nymphs requested the help of the god Nemesis. From now on, Narcissus could only fall in love with the one person who will never, ever love him back: himself, reflected in a pond. He looked and couldn’t look away. He died there, still gazing, and a flower grew where he used to be. A narcissus. The myth ends by turning a man’s vanity into a plant, which, again … Ivysaur, has literal bud growing out of his back that’s going to become a flower the second he evolves. I did not plan this parallel. The universes handed it to me on a plate, the same way it handed Narcissus his own reflection, and look how that turned out for him: “oh wonderful boy, I loved you in vain farewell”.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who spends more time in a museum than forming a cute parasocial bond with a small plant creature (like I did) … you might already know this scene has been painted many times and by some of the greatest artists of history. I won’t speak about all of them but I can’t write an article about Narcissus without mentioning Caravaggio. In the late 1590’s, he painted a pure claustrophobic representation of the myth: a boy and his reflection making one closed loop out of the darkness. There’s no scenery, no witnesses … nothing to distract you from how lonely and silent this is. The chiaroscuro even emphazises the feeling of a fatal obsession … something comparable to scrolling through your phone in the middle of the night, alone in the dark, to check the perfection of your latest selfie. Few decades later, Poussin, chose a more dramatic moment for his painting. Here, Narcissus is already dying by the water, while Echo dissolves into a rock nearby, grieving. Between them, a little cherub is holding a torch and witnessing the drama. He warns the viewer of the pains of love and announces the the imminent metamorphosis.

But it’s the Pre-Raphaelites who really speak to me the most on this subject, because they could not paint a sad man by a pond without cataloguing every single reed, lily pad, and moss patch in the surroundings. Waterhouses’s Echo and Nacissus (1903) is holding a profound melancholy. The boy seems to be facing the worst psychological crisis of his life while surrounded by the most emotionally detailed flora, under the bewildered gaze of the nymph. In a way, a Japanese illustrator and a dead Victorian are doing the same job: drowning the sad little guy in enough foliage and nature that you almost forget his fate.

The artist who actually painted this specific card is a real, credited illustrator called Yoriyuki Ikegami. Her entire reputation in the Pokémon TCG world is built on precisely this abundance. Ikegami’s first-ever published card, back in 2022 (in Japan), was a piece called Gardenia’s Vigor … a Grass-type Trainer tending her garden, subtly surrounded by so many Pokémon and so much vegetation that an Ivysaur’s bulb nearly disappears into the blossoms on the foreground. Fans of the game have a taken joking that Ikegami has a “green thumb” because it seems impossible for her to represent a Pokémon without also representing the lush environment it lives in.

Here’s another part I also really care about: the psychology behind the myth. Freud picked it up in 1914 and used it to explain something that isn’t inherently a diagnosis. It is just a phase everyone goes though, loving your own reflected image before you’re able to love anything outside yourself. It only becomes a problem when you get stuck there: Narcissism (… social media certainly didn’t help with it). Lacan later said we all meet ourselves as an image before we ever really know ourselves as a person. A baby sees itself in the mirror looking more together than it actually is, and builds an entire identity on that gap. Which, sorry, but that’s what a selfie is now. And that’s what a trading card is too, if I’m honest … a small glossy rectangle you can hold up and go “yes, that’s mine, that’s part of who I am”, a reflection you get to keep in your pocket and take out whenever you need reminding you exist.

Maybe the artist who painted Ivysaur wasn’t thinking about Ovid’s Metamorphosis, or Caravaggio’s blacked-out background, or Freud’s little essay, or any of this. But some images are old enough that they don’t need to be invited back and they just turn up again, in a museum or a booster pack, because apparently we’ve never stopped needing to paint the exact moment someone looks at themselves and can’t still quite believe what they see or who they are.

Bibliography:

Ovid (1984) Metamorphoses. Volume I: Books I-VIII. Translated by F.J. Miller, revised by G.P. Goold. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loeb Classical Library 42. Book III.

Freud, S. (1957) ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press.

Lacan, J. (2006 [1949]) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Fink, B. (trans.) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton.