Pamela Colman Smith
Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), nicknamed Pixie, was an Anglo-American illustrator and the author of the 78 drawings of the Rider-Waite tarot deck published in 1909, arguably the most influential tarot deck of the 20th century.
Origin and etymology
Born in London on February 16, 1878, the daughter of an American merchant, Pamela Colman Smith grew up between Manchester, New York and Jamaica. She studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1893 to 1897 under Arthur Wesley Dow. A member of the theatrical circle of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, she illustrated posters, folktales and books for William Butler Yeats, to whom she was close. In 1903, she joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London. It was in this context that she met Arthur Edward Waite, who in 1909 commissioned her to illustrate a complete tarot deck.
Evolution and tradition
Published by William Rider & Son in December 1909, the deck is today known as the Rider-Waite or Waite-Smith, or more recently RWS. Smith's major innovation was to give a figurative scene to each of the 56 Minor cards, whereas the Tarot de Marseille used only geometric motifs. For this considerable work, she received only a modest payment and gradually lost the rights to her drawings, which entered the public domain in the United Kingdom in 1986. Converted to Catholicism in 1911, she ended her life in Cornwall in relative poverty, and died in Bude on September 18, 1951.
Practical use
Any consultation of a Rider-Waite deck or of one of its countless derivatives (Universal Waite, Radiant Rider-Waite, Smith-Waite Centennial) involves reading the drawings of Pamela Colman Smith. Her visual grammar — primary colors, narrative scenes, readable postures, hidden symbols — has guided the majority of English-speaking tarot readers for a century. On Tarotoui, references to the Rider-Waite implicitly refer to her work. Since the 2010s, a recognition movement has aimed to reissue the deck under the name Waite-Smith or to fully credit her contribution.
Going further
Smith's contribution was long underplayed behind Waite's name, although she is the true author of the visual language of modern tarot. The research of Stuart Kaplan and Melinda Boyd Parsons since the 1980s has restored her place. Note that her original drawings bear her stylized initials PCS at the bottom of each card, often invisible in cheap reprints.