← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 119/121
Pamela Colman Smith
Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was the illustrator, stage designer and storyteller who drew the seventy-eight cards of the deck published in London at the end of 1909, now widely called the Rider–Waite–Smith deck. Arthur Edward Waite planned it; she drew it, and the scenes she invented for the numbered cards are the reason it changed the tarot. For most of a century her name was left off the box. Her friends called her "Pixie".
Her life
Smith was born in Pimlico, London, on 16 February 1878, to American parents. She grew up partly in England — in Chislehurst and Manchester — and partly in Kingston, Jamaica, where her father worked from the early 1890s. She studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1893 to 1897, and in 1899 published Annancy Stories, her retelling of Jamaican folk tales of Anansi, which she loved to perform in costume all her life.
After her father's death in 1899 she joined the Lyceum Theatre company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, toured with them and designed sets and costumes. In London her studio became a gathering place for writers and artists, among them W. B. Yeats, who drew her into the Golden Dawn in 1901; when the Order split she followed Waite's branch. She edited her own small magazine, The Green Sheaf, illustrated books for little money, and often painted while listening to music, setting down what the music made her see. In 1907 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz showed her drawings at his New York gallery — the first exhibition there of work that was not photography.
The cards
She worked on the tarot through much of 1909. In a letter of 19 November that year she wrote that she had "just finished a big job for very little cash" — a set of designs for a pack of tarot cards. She was paid a flat fee and received no royalties from a deck that has sold in very large numbers ever since.
How the work was divided is not fully known. Waite clearly directed the Major Arcana, which follow his own ideas and the Golden Dawn's. For the forty numbered cards — the pips — historians generally credit Smith with most of the scenes. Waite seems to have given her the suits' elements and lists of traditional meanings, many of them going back to Etteilla; she chose what to show, drew on figures from her own earlier paintings and theatre work, and studied photographs of the fifteenth-century Sola Busca tarot, the only older deck with scenes on its pips. Waite's descriptions of the minor cards in his book read like those of someone looking at finished pictures, and sometimes miss what they show. Her small monogram appears on almost every card.
Later years
In 1911 Smith became a Catholic. She designed posters for the women's suffrage movement and for the Red Cross during the First World War. In 1919 she moved to The Lizard in Cornwall, where she ran a holiday house for priests, and around 1942 to Bude, where she died on 18 September 1951. Her work had never brought her much money, and what she left went to pay her debts.
Her place now
Since the late twentieth century readers and historians have worked to give Smith her due — hence names such as "Waite–Smith" and "Rider–Waite–Smith" for the deck — and her wider art has been exhibited and studied again. Her cards remain the pictures through which most English-speaking readers first learn the tarot.