Pamela Colman Smith
Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 – 18 September 1951), nicknamed "Pixie", was a
British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the
Rider–Waite tarot deck (also called the Rider–Waite–Smith or Waite–Smith deck) for Arthur
Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the
most widely used today.[1][2][3] Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of
Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused
on women writers.[4]
Pamela Colman Smith
Smith in the October 1912 issue
of The Craftsman magazine
Born
16 February 1878
Pimlico, London, England
Died
18 September 1951 (aged 73)
Bude, Cornwall, England
Nationality
British
Other names
Pixie
Alma mater
Pratt Institute
Occupation(s)
Artist, illustrator, and writer
Known for
Waite–Smith tarot deck
Biography
Smith was born at 28 Belgrave Road in Pimlico, part of central London.[5] She was the only child
of an American merchant from Brooklyn, New York (before it was part of New York City), Charles
Edward Smith (son of Brooklyn mayor Cyrus Porter Smith), and his wife Corinne Colman (sister
of the painter Samuel Colman). The family was based in Manchester for the first decade of
Smith's life, but they moved to Jamaica when Charles Smith took a job in 1889 with the West
India Improvement Company (a financial syndicate involved in extending the Jamaican railroad
system). The Smiths lived in the capital, Kingston, for several years, travelling to London and New
York.
World War I-era poster encouraging
people to buy a bulldog, with proceeds
going to benefit soldiers
By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute,
which had been founded six years earlier. There she studied art under Arthur Wesley Dow,
painter, print maker, photographer, and influential arts educator.[6] Her mature drawing style
shows clear traces of the visionary qualities of fin-de-siècle Symbolism and the Romanticism of
the preceding Arts and Crafts movement. While Smith was in art school, her mother died in
Jamaica, in 1896. Smith herself was ill on and off during these years and in the end left Pratt in
1897 without a degree. She became an illustrator; some of her first projects included The
Illustrated Verses of William Butler Yeats, a book on actress Dame Ellen Terry by Bram Stoker, and
two of her own books, Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity (a reference to Vanity Fair).
In 1899 her father died, leaving Smith at the age of 21 without either parent. She returned to
England that year, continuing to work as an illustrator, and branching out into theatrical design
for a miniature theatre. In London, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theatre group
led by Terry (who is said to have given her the nickname 'Pixie'), Henry Irving, and Bram Stoker
and traveled with them around the country, working on costumes and stage design.
In 1901, she established a studio in London and held a weekly open house for artists, authors,
actors, and others involved with the arts. Arthur Ransome, then in his early 20s, describes one of
these "at home" evenings, and the curious artistic circle around Smith, in his 1907 Bohemia in
London.
Pamela Colman Smith, photographed
in 1904 for The Reader magazine
Smith wrote and illustrated two books about Jamaican folklore: Annancy Stories (1899) and
Chim-Chim, Folk Stories from Jamaica (1905). These books included Jamaican versions of tales
involving the traditional African folk figure Anansi the Spider.[7] She also continued her illustration
work, taking on projects for William Butler Yeats and his brother, the painter Jack Yeats. She
illustrated Bram Stoker's last novel, The Lair of the White Worm in 1911, and Ellen Terry's book on
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, The Russian Ballet in 1913.
Smith supported the struggle for the right to vote, and through the Suffrage Atelier, a collective of
professional illustrators, she contributed artwork to further the cause of women's suffrage in
Great Britain. Additionally, Smith donated her services for more poster designs and toys to the
Red Cross during World War I.[8]
In 1903, Smith launched her own magazine under the title The Green Sheaf, with contributions by
Yeats, Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall), Cecil French, A. E. (George William Russell),
Gordon Craig (Ellen Terry's son), Dorothy Ward, John Todhunter, and others. The Green Sheaf
survived for a little over a year, a total of 13 issues.[9]
Discouraged by The Green Sheaf's lack of financial success, Smith shifted her efforts towards
setting up a small press in London. In 1904, she established The Green Sheaf Press which
published a variety of novels, poems, fairy tales, and folktales until at least 1906, mostly by
women writers.[10]
In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz gave an exhibition of Smith's paintings in New York at his Little Galleries
of the Photo-Secession (also known as gallery 291), making Smith the first painter to have a
show at what had been until then a gallery devoted exclusively to the photographic avant-garde.
Stieglitz was intrigued by Smith's synaesthetic sensibility; in this period, Smith would paint
visions that came to her while listening to music. The show was successful enough that Stieglitz
issued a platinum print portfolio of 22 of her paintings and showed her work twice more, in 1908
and 1909. Some Smith works that did not sell remained with Stieglitz and ended up in the
Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at Yale University.[11]
Pamela Colman Smith, The Blue Cat
(1907), watercolor on paper board
Yeats introduced Smith to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which she joined in 1901 and
in the process met Waite. When the Golden Dawn splintered due to personality conflicts, Smith
moved with Waite to the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn (or Holy Order of the
Golden Dawn). In 1909, Waite commissioned Smith to produce a tarot deck with appeal to the
world of art, and the result was the unique Waite–Smith tarot deck. Published by William Rider &
Son of London, it has endured as the world's most popular 78-card tarot deck. The innovative
cards depict full scenes with figures and symbols on all of the cards including the pips, and
Smith's distinctive drawings have become the basis for the design of many subsequent packs.[12]
Apart from book illustration projects and the tarot deck, her art found little in the way of
commercial outlets after her early success with Stieglitz in New York. Several examples of her
works done in gouache were collected by her cousin, the American Sherlock Holmes actor
William Gillette, and may be found today prominently displayed in his castle in Connecticut.
In 1911, Smith converted to Roman Catholicism. After the end of the First World War, Smith
received an inheritance from an uncle that enabled her to lease a house on the Lizard Peninsula
in Cornwall, an area popular with artists. For income, she established a vacation home for
Catholic priests in a neighboring house. Her longtime friend, Nora Lake, joined her in Cornwall
and helped to run the vacation home.[13]
After several years of financial difficulty, Smith left the Lizard and relocated first to Exeter in
1939, and then to Bude in the early 1940s. Although she continued writing and illustrating, she
was unable to find publishers for her work, likely due to changes in public taste following the
First World War.[14]
Smith died in her apartment at the Bencoolen House in Bude on 18 September 1951. Her
possessions were auctioned off to pay her debts. The location of her gravesite is unknown, but it
is likely that she was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Michael's Cemetery in Bude.[14]
Waite–Smith Tarot
"The Fool" card from the Waite–Smith
tarot deck
The 78 illustrations that make up the Waite–Smith tarot deck "represent archetypal subjects that
each become a portal to an invisible realm of signs and symbols, believed to be channeled
through processes of divination." They are original works of art and unique in terms of the cards'
stylization, draftsmanship, and composition, which is a significant aesthetic achievement. They
are one of the best examples of Smith's imagination for fantasy, folly, ecstasy, death, and the
macabre.[6]
When Smith's tarot was first published by Rider, in England, in December 1909, it was simply
called Tarot Cards and it was accompanied by Arthur Edward Waite's guide entitled The Key to
the Tarot. The following year Waite added Smith's black-and-white drawings to the book and
published it as The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. In 1971, U.S. Games bought the right to publish the
deck and published it under the title The Rider Tarot Deck (because of differences in U.S. and U.K.
copyright law, the extent of their copyright in the Waite–Smith deck is disputed).[15] In later
editions they changed the name to Rider Tarot and then Rider Waite Tarot. Today most scholars,
in order to recognize the importance of Smith's contribution, refer to the deck as the Waite–Smith
Tarot.[16] Tarot writers often refer to the deck with the simple abbreviation of RWS, for Rider–
Waite–Smith.
In the century since the deck's first printing, there have been dozens of editions put out by
various publishers; for some of these the Smith drawings were redrawn by other artists, and for
others the cards were rephotographed to create new printing plates. Many versions have been
recolored as the coloration is rather harsh in the original deck, due to the limitations of color
printing at the time. One example is the 1968 Albano-Waite tarot, which has brighter colors
overlaid on the same pen-and-ink drawings. Some recent U.S. Games editions have removed
Smith's hand-drawn titles for each card, substituting text in a standard typeface. Altogether,
these decks encompass the full range from editions very closely based on the original printings
to decks that can at most be termed 'inspired' by the Waite–Smith deck.
Waite is often cited as the designer of the Waite–Smith Tarot, but it would be more accurate to
consider him as half of a design team, with responsibility for the major concepts, the structure of
individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he
commissioned Smith to create the actual deck.[17]
It is likely that Smith worked from Waite's written and verbal instructions rather than from
sketches; that is, from detailed descriptions of the desired designs. This is how illustrators often
work, and as a commercial illustrator, Smith would probably have been comfortable with such a
working process. It appears that Waite provided detailed instructions mainly or exclusively for
the Major Arcana, and simple lists of meanings for the Minor Arcana or 'pip' cards. Thus the
memorable scenes of the Minor Arcana owe largely to Smith's own invention. The Minor Arcana
are indeed one of the notable achievements of this deck, as most earlier tarot decks (especially
those of the Marseilles type) have extremely simple pip cards. Smith's innovative illustrations for
the Minor Arcana, with their rich symbolism, made the Waite–Smith deck a widely imitated
model for other tarot decks.[18]
Smith and Waite drew on a number of sources as inspirations for the deck's designs. In
particular, it appears that Waite took his inspiration for the trumps mainly from the French Tarot
of Marseilles (although the oldest date from the 16th century, his model was possibly a
Marseilles deck from the 18th century). It is not unlikely that other Marseilles-type Italian tarot
decks from the 18th or 19th century were used as additional models. For the pips, it appears that
Smith drew mainly on the 15th century Italian Sola Busca tarot;[19] the 3 of Swords, for example,
clearly shows the congruity between the two decks. In addition, there is evidence that some
figures in the deck are portraits of Smith's friends, notably actresses Ellen Terry (the Queen of
Wands) and Florence Farr (the World).[20]
Smith completed the art for the deck in the six months between April and October 1909. This is a
short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures[19] (the number claimed by Smith
in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909 and corresponding almost exactly to the standard 78-card tarot
deck).[21] The illustrations were most likely done in pen and ink, possibly over a pencil
underdrawing; the original drawings are lost so this cannot be determined with certainty at
present. They were either colored with watercolor by Smith or colored by someone else after the
fact.
Posthumous exhibitions
An exhibition of Smith's art entitled To All Believers—The Art of Pamela Colman Smith was held in
the United States in 1975. It was sponsored by the University of Delaware and the Delaware Art
Museum in association with the Delaware chapter of The Victorian Society in America.[22] The
exhibition was held at the Delaware Art Museum from 11 September to 19 October, and at the
Art Museum, Princeton University, from 4 November to 7 December.[23]
An exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle, was held in 2007–2008. It
was at three museums: the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the High
Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; and the San Diego Museum of Art in San Diego, California.
The exhibition included works by Smith and other women artists who were active in the art and
photography scene prior to O'Keeffe. Their works help to put O'Keeffe's art in the context of the
time.[24] The exhibition was based on the scholarly book Modernism and the Feminine Voice:
O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle by Kathleen Pyne, which contains a chapter on
Smith.[25]
In 2019, the Brooklyn Campus of the Pratt Institute Libraries held an exhibition of Smith's work
entitled Pamela Colman Smith: Life and Work. The exhibition included books, prints,
reproductions of paintings and illustrations, tarot decks, and photographs.[26][27]
References
1. Decker, Ronald; Dummett, Michael (2019). A History of the Occult Tarot. London: Duckworth. p. 291.
ISBN 9780715645727.
2. Giles, Cynthia (1994). The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 46.
ISBN 0671891014.
3. Visions and Prophecies (https://archive.org/details/visionsprophecie00time/page/142/mode/2up) .
Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books. 1988. p. 142.
4. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S. Game
Systems. p. 11. ISBN 9781572819122.
5. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2009). The Artwork & Times of Pamela Colman Smith. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S.
Game Systems. p. 5.
6. "Reviving a Forgotten Artist of the Occult" (https://hyperallergic.com/490918/pamela-colman-smith-pr
att-institute-libraries/) . Hyperallergic. 23 March 2019. Retrieved 17 April 2020.
7. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2009). The Artwork & Times of Pamela Colman Smith. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S.
Game Systems. pp. 30–32.
8. Pyne, Kathleen (2007). Modernism and the feminine voice: O'Keeffe and the women of the Stieglitz circle
(https://archive.org/details/modernismfeminin0000pyne/page/59) . Berkeley: University of California
Press. pp. 59 (https://archive.org/details/modernismfeminin0000pyne/page/59) .
ISBN 9780520241909. "She worked for the Red Cross during World War I, again contributing poster
designs and toys she made herself for children's aid."
9. O'Connor, Elizabeth Foley (2016). " "We disgruntled devils don't please anybody": Pamela Colman
Smith, The Green Sheaf, and Female Literary Networks" (https://web.archive.org/web/2017040208292
6/https://cup.sites.clemson.edu/scr/articles/scr-48n2-oconnor.pdf)
(PDF). The South Carolina
Review. v. 48, no. 2: 73–89. Archived from the original (https://cup.sites.clemson.edu/scr/articles/scr-
48n2-oconnor.pdf)
(PDF) on 2 April 2017. Retrieved 1 April 2017 – via Clemson University.
10. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S. Game
Systems. pp. 56–58. ISBN 9781572819122.
11. Norfleet, Phil. "Alfred Stieglitz and Pamela Colman Smith: Biography of Pamela Colman Smith" (http://p
cs2051.tripod.com/stieglitz_archive.htm) , pcs2051.tripod.com. Accessed 15 November 2022.
12. Jensen, K. Frank (2006) The Story of the Waite–Smith Tarot, Croydon Hills, Australia; ISBN 0-9757122-17
13. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S. Game
Systems. p. 86. ISBN 9781572819122.
14. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S. Game
Systems. pp. 89–90. ISBN 9781572819122.
15. "The Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot Card Copyright FAQ" (http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/faq.htm#usga
mesclaim) . Sacred-texts.com. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
16. Jensen, K. Frank (July 2005). "The Early Waite–Smith Tarot Editions" (https://web.archive.org/web/200
60721004631/http://www.manteia-online.dk/wst-ipcs/wst-ipcs.pdf)
(PDF). The Playing Card: Journal
of the International Playing Card Society. 34 (1). Archived from the original (http://www.manteia-online.
dk/wst-ipcs/wst-ipcs.pdf)
(PDF) on 21 July 2006. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
17. Waite, Arthur Edward. Shadow of Life and Thought. Kessinger Publishing, page 184 ISBN 1-56459-2421
18. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2009). The Artwork & Times of Pamela Colman Smith. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S.
Game Systems. pp. 76–77.
19. Place, Robert M. (2005) The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, Tarcher/Penguin, New York,
2005, pages 177-186 ISBN 1-58542-349-1
20. Jensen, Frank K. The Early Waite–Smith Tarot Editions, p. 31.
21. Kaplan, Stuart R.. The Encyclopedia of Tarot Volume III, U.S. Games Inc., Stanford, CT, 1990, p. 30
ISBN 0-88079-122-5
22. Kaplan, Stuart R. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. Stamford, Connecticut: U.S. Game
Systems. p. 410. ISBN 9781572819122.
23. Parsons, Melinda Boyd (1975). To All Believers: The Art of Pamela Colman Smith. University of
Delaware.
24. "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle" (http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/8aa/8aa15.htm) .
tfaoi.com. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
25. Pyne, Kathleen (2007). "The Photo-Secession and the Death of the Mother: Gertrude Kasebier and
Pamela Colman Smith". Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz
Circle (https://archive.org/details/modernismfeminin0000pyne/page/1)
. Berkeley: University of
California Press. pp. 1–61 (https://archive.org/details/modernismfeminin0000pyne/page/1) .
ISBN 9780520241909.
26. "Opening Reception and Tarot Reading for Pamela Colman Smith: Life and Work" (https://www.pratt.ed
u/events/event/14556/) . Pratt Institute. Retrieved 14 March 2021.
27. Ray, Sharmistha (23 March 2019). "Reviving a Forgotten Artist of the Occult" (https://hyperallergic.co
m/490918/pamela-colman-smith-pratt-institute-libraries/) . Hyperallergic. Retrieved 14 March 2021.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pamela Colman Smith.
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Pamela Colman Smith
American Women in the Arts (https://web.archive.org/web/20120217005541/http://beinecke.l
ibrary.yale.edu/awia/gallery/smith.html)
Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections (https://web.archive.org/web/2014041906484
7/http://www.brynmawr.edu/Library/speccoll/guides/smith.shtml)
Biographical information (https://archive.today/20121220003006/http://home.comcast.net/~
pamela-c-smith/home.html)
Works by Pamela Colman Smith (https://www.gutenberg.org/author/Smith,+Pamela+Colma
n)
at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Pamela Colman Smith (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subj
ect%3A%22Smith%2C%20Pamela%20Colman%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Smith%2C%20Pa
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olman%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Smith%2C%20Pamela%20C%2E%22%20OR%20desc
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e:software%29)
at Internet Archive
Pamela Colman Smith (https://lccn.loc.gov/nr90026060)
with 7 catalogue records
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Pamela_Colman_Smith&oldid=1127181340"
at Library of Congress Authorities,