Pamela Colman Smith

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Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), known to friends as “Pixie,” was a British-American artist, illustrator, and folklorist who, in 1909, drew all seventy-eight cards of the tarot deck published by William Rider & Son — the most widely used and imitated tarot of the twentieth century, now generally called the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.

She was born in London to American parents and raised between England, Jamaica, and the United States, training briefly at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before returning to London. There she moved in the orbit of W. B. Yeats and the actress Ellen Terry’s theatrical circle, illustrated books, edited a short-lived arts periodical, and exhibited paintings of figures she said came to her while she listened to music. In 1901 she was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the period’s most influential ceremonial magic society, where she met the occultist and scholar Arthur Edward Waite.

The commission that fixed her name came from Waite, who directed the deck’s symbolism and engaged Smith to execute the images. Her decisive contribution lay in the minor arcana. Earlier European decks had marked the pip cards only with arrangements of their suit signs — four cups, seven swords — as on ordinary playing cards. Smith instead drew each as a small narrative scene, a figure caught in some legible human situation. That choice, more than any other single feature, is why the deck became the template later readers learned on: the pictures carry meaning that can be read directly, and most modern decks descend from her solution. Her monogram appears on the cards, but the deck went out under the names of publisher and designer, and for decades her share went largely unacknowledged.

Smith was not, by the testimony that survives, a working diviner; she was the artist who gave a divinatory system its enduring face. She converted to Roman Catholicism around 1911, continued to illustrate and to make art, and inherited a small property in Cornwall, but the tarot brought her a flat fee and no royalties. She died at Bude in 1951, in debt and without public reputation, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Her standing has since inverted. Scholarship and the deck’s later publishers have restored her name to the title — the “Smith” in Rider–Waite–Smith is a deliberate correction — and her drawings are now studied as artwork in their own right, the work of a distinctive hand rather than mere illustration of another’s scheme. The images she made for a single 1909 commission remain, for most people who have handled a tarot deck at all, what the cards look like.

→ In the library: Papus — The Tarot of the Bohemians (1910)

→ Related: Paul Foster Case · Divination