Pamela Colman Smith: the artist behind the tarot

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

If you have ever shuffled a tarot deck, there is a good chance you have held her work in your hands. The deck published by William Rider and Son in London in 1909 became the model for most tarot decks made since. For most of the twentieth century it carried the names of its publisher and of the occultist A. E. Waite. The woman who actually drew all seventy-eight cards, Pamela Colman Smith, was barely mentioned. On this page I tell her story as an artist, not only as the tarot’s illustrator.

Early life: London, Manchester, Jamaica, Brooklyn

Pamela Colman Smith was born in Pimlico, London, in February 1878. Her parents were American. Her father, Charles Edward Smith, was a Brooklyn merchant, and her mother, Corinne Colman, was the sister of the American painter Samuel Colman. The family lived in Manchester for her first decade, then moved to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1889, when her father took a job connected with the island’s railroad. They traveled often between Jamaica, London and New York.

So from childhood she lived between places and cultures. Jamaica, in particular, left a mark. She listened to and later retold Jamaican folk tales, including stories of Anansi the spider, the trickster of West African and Caribbean tradition.

In 1893, at fifteen, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a young art school, where she studied with the painter and printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow taught design built from line, flat areas of color and careful composition, influenced by Japanese prints. You can see that training in her tarot cards: bold outlines, flat color, strong simple shapes. Her mother died in 1896, and Smith, often unwell, left Pratt in 1897 without a degree.

Work: illustrator, storyteller, stage designer

Smith started working as an illustrator in New York in the late 1890s. Her early projects included illustrated verses by W. B. Yeats and her own picture books. One of them, Widdicombe Fair (1899), a hand-colored book based on the English folk song, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (object 40.115.2). The same year she published Annancy Stories, her retelling of Jamaican tales.

Her father died in 1899, and she moved back to England. In London she joined the world of the Lyceum Theatre around the actress Ellen Terry, the actor Henry Irving and the theater manager Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. She worked on costumes and stage designs and toured with the company. Terry is said to have given her the nickname “Pixie,” which stayed with her for life.

She was a performer as well as an artist. She told folk tales aloud, in costume, at gatherings and in her studio. From 1901 she held a weekly open evening for artists, actors and writers in London. The writer Arthur Ransome described one of these evenings, and the colorful circle around her, in his book Bohemia in London (1907).

She was also a publisher. In 1903 she launched a small magazine, The Green Sheaf, with contributions from Yeats and others in his circle. It ran for thirteen issues. She then set up the Green Sheaf Press, which published mostly women writers until around 1906.

Art and music: the Stieglitz shows

One of the most surprising chapters in her life took place in New York. In 1907 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz showed her drawings at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, the gallery later known as 291. It was the first time the gallery had shown work that was not photography. Stieglitz went on to show the modern masters there, so Smith stands at the start of a famous story.

Many of the works were “music pictures.” Smith painted images that came to her while listening to music, and described seeing scenes and figures as the music played. The show sold well enough for Stieglitz to show her work again in 1908 and 1909. A charcoal portrait of her by the caricaturist Marius de Zayas, made around 1910, is in the Met’s Alfred Stieglitz Collection (49.70.221a, b).

These pictures matter for understanding her tarot. She was used to turning something invisible, a mood, a piece of music, a story, into a single image that carried its feeling. That is exactly what a tarot card asks of an artist.

The Golden Dawn and the 1909 deck

Yeats introduced Smith to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society, and she joined it in 1901. There she met Arthur Edward Waite, a writer on mysticism and magic. When the order split, she followed Waite into his own branch.

In 1909 Waite asked her to illustrate a new tarot. Rider published the deck that year, and Waite’s guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910. Waite set the program for the twenty-two trumps, and his ideas about their symbolism shaped them. Smith drew all seventy-eight cards in a few months.

Her crucial innovation was in the fifty-six minor cards. In most older decks, the numbered cards simply showed the right number of suit symbols, for example seven cups or nine coins, like ordinary playing cards. Smith gave every one of them a full scene with people, places and action. A woman blindfolded among swords. A man carrying a bundle of wands. A child offering a cup of flowers. Suddenly every card told a story, and a beginner could read a card from its picture.

She had one notable model. A fifteenth century Italian deck, the Sola Busca tarot, also has illustrated minor cards, and photographs of it were available in London at the British Museum in the years before 1909. Several of Smith’s designs, such as the Three of Swords and the Ten of Swords, closely echo Sola Busca cards. You can read about that deck on my page about tarot and art history.

She was paid a fee for the work. In a letter to Stieglitz in 1909 she wrote that she had just finished “a big job for very little cash.” She received no royalties when the deck became a worldwide bestseller decades later.

Reading her cards as art

Smith’s style is easy to recognize once you know it. Look for these features:

• Bold black outlines around every shape, like a woodcut or stained glass.
• Flat areas of color with little shading.
• Stage-like settings. Figures often stand on a narrow strip of ground in front of a backdrop, as if on a stage, and some cards look like scenes from a play.
• Clear gestures. Her figures act with their whole bodies. You can often guess a card’s meaning from a pose.
• Her monogram. On many cards a small sign made from her initials appears in a corner or on a surface.

Try putting her Magician next to a Tarot de Marseille Magician. The older figure is a street conjurer at a table of cups and balls. Hers is a young magus with one hand raised to the sky and one pointing to the ground, with the four suit symbols laid out before him. The change came from Waite’s program, but the clarity of the image came from her. My close reading of The Hermit walks through one card in detail.

Later life

In 1911 Smith became a Roman Catholic. She continued to illustrate books, including Bram Stoker’s last novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and contributed artwork to the women’s suffrage campaign through the Suffrage Atelier, a collective of illustrators. During the First World War she designed posters and toys for the Red Cross.

After the war an inheritance allowed her to move to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, where she ran a holiday house for Catholic priests with her friend Nora Lake. Money became a constant worry. She moved to Exeter in 1939, then to Bude, on the north coast of Cornwall, where she died in 1951. Her possessions were sold to cover her debts, and her grave was unmarked.

Legacy: giving her name back

Historical Smith drew the cards. The documents are clear on that, and her monogram is on them. For decades, though, the deck was sold as the Rider or Rider-Waite tarot, and her name was rarely printed on the box.

Later tradition From the late twentieth century, tarot historians and readers began to restore her credit. The 2018 book Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story by Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor and Melinda Boyd Parsons gathered her letters, art and life in one place. Today many people call the deck Rider-Waite-Smith, Waite-Smith or Smith-Waite.

Modern I use Rider-Waite-Smith on this site, and I think every reader who learns on her images owes her that small courtesy. Her cards are the reason so many of us could start reading tarot from pictures alone. When you lay out a spread, you are looking at the work of a working artist who was underpaid and underrated, and who saw stories everywhere.

Try it: read one of her minor cards

Pick any numbered card from her deck, say the Five of Pentacles or the Eight of Cups, and treat it like a painting. Cover the title. List what you see: figures, weather, buildings, objects, colors. Ask what is happening and what in the picture makes you say so. Only then look up the card’s meaning and see how much of it you already found in the image. That is the gift she gave beginners, and it works because she was, first of all, a storyteller in pictures.

Where to see her work

Because the tarot is a printed deck, there is no single original to visit. Scans of early printings are on Wikimedia Commons, and the 1909 designs are in the public domain in the United States. Her other works are scattered. The Met holds Widdicombe Fair, and some of her paintings from the Stieglitz shows are in the Stieglitz and O’Keeffe archive at Yale.

If you want to learn the cards she drew, start with my tarot hub or browse the card meanings. My tarot book teaches the deck step by step, with her images in mind.