Pamela Colman Smith
Encyclopedia
Pamela Colman Smith also nicknamed Pixie, was an artist, illustrator, and writer. She is best known for designing the Waite-Smith deck
of divinatory tarot
cards (also called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite
.
, Middlesex
(now London
), England the only child of an American
merchant from Brooklyn
, Charles Edward Smith and his wife Corinne Colman. The family was based in Manchester for the first decade of Smith's life, but the family 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 family lived in Kingston, Jamaica, for several years but traveled between Jamaica, London, and Brooklyn, New York.
By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the relatively new Pratt Institute
and studied art under the noted artist teacher Arthur Wesley Dow
. 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 and became an illustrator. Her illustration projects in the late 1890s included The Illustrated Verses of William Butler Yeats, a book on the actress Ellen Terry
by Bram Stoker
, and two of her own books, Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity.
Returning to England in 1899 (the year her father died), she became a theatrical designer for a miniature theatre and continued to work as an illustrator. In London, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theatre group led by Ellen 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.
Smith wrote and illustrated several books about Jamaican folklore
, including Annancy Stories (1902) which were about Jamaican versions of tales involving the traditional Africa
n folk figure Anansi
the Spider. 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. Through a studio known as the London Suffrage Atelier, she contributed artwork to further the cause of women's suffrage in Great Britain.
In 1903, Pamela 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.
In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz
gave Smith an exhibition of 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.
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.
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 beautiful examples of her works done in gouache
were collected by her cousin, Sherlock Holmes
stage actor William Gillette
, and may be found today prominently displayed in the permanent collection at his castle in East Haddam, Connecticut.
In 1911, Smith converted to Catholicism. After the end of the First World War, Smith received an inheritance from an uncle that enabled her to buy a house in Cornwall
, an area popular with artists. For income, she established a vacation home for Catholic priests in a neighboring house. She never married, and she died penniless in Bude
, Cornwall on the 18th of September, 1951. After her death, all of her personal effects, including her paintings and drawings, were sold at auction to satisfy her debts.
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). 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.
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 concept, the structure of individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he commissioned the talented and intuitive Smith to create the actual deck.
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, and thus that 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. One reason for the enduring success of the Waite-Smith deck may be the richness of symbolic signification that Smith brought to the Minor Arcana.
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 Italian Sola Busca Tarot; 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).
Smith completed the art for the deck between April and October 1909, a six-month period. This is a short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures (the number claimed by Smith in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909). 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.
Rider-Waite tarot deck
The Rider-Waite tarot deck is the most popular Tarot deck in use today in the English-speaking world . Other suggested names for this include the Rider-Waite-Smith, Waite-Smith, Waite-Colman Smith or simply the Rider deck...
of divinatory tarot
Tarot
The tarot |trionfi]] and later as tarocchi, tarock, and others) is a pack of cards , used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play a group of card games such as Italian tarocchini and French tarot...
cards (also called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite
Arthur Edward Waite
Arthur Edward Waite was a scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. As his biographer, R.A...
.
Biography
Smith was born in PimlicoPimlico
Pimlico is a small area of central London in the City of Westminster. Like Belgravia, to which it was built as a southern extension, Pimlico is known for its grand garden squares and impressive Regency architecture....
, Middlesex
Middlesex
Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...
(now London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
), England the only child of an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
merchant from Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, Charles Edward Smith and his wife Corinne Colman. The family was based in Manchester for the first decade of Smith's life, but the family 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 family lived in Kingston, Jamaica, for several years but traveled between Jamaica, London, and Brooklyn, New York.
By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the relatively new Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
and studied art under the noted artist teacher Arthur Wesley Dow
Arthur Wesley Dow
Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator....
. 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 and became an illustrator. Her illustration projects in the late 1890s included The Illustrated Verses of William Butler Yeats, a book on the actress Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
by Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...
, and two of her own books, Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity.
Returning to England in 1899 (the year her father died), she became a theatrical designer for a miniature theatre and continued to work as an illustrator. In London, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theatre group led by Ellen Terry (who is said to have given her the nickname 'Pixie'), Henry Irving
Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...
, 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.
Smith wrote and illustrated several books about Jamaican folklore
Culture of Jamaica
Jamaican culture represents a rich blend of cultures that have inhabited the Greater Antilles island, Jamaica. The original Taino Settlers, followed by their Spanish conquerors , all made major contributions...
, including Annancy Stories (1902) which were about Jamaican versions of tales involving the traditional Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n folk figure Anansi
Anansi
Anansi the trickster is a spider, and is one of the most important characters of West African and Caribbean folklore.He is also known as Ananse, Kwaku Ananse, and Anancy; and in the Southern United States he has evolved into Aunt Nancy. He is a spider, but often acts and appears as a man...
the Spider. She also continued her illustration work, taking on projects for William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
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
Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company from Russia which performed between 1909 and 1929 in many countries. Directed by Sergei Diaghilev, it is regarded as the greatest ballet company of the 20th century. Many of its dancers originated from the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg...
, The Russian Ballet in 1913. Through a studio known as the London Suffrage Atelier, she contributed artwork to further the cause of women's suffrage in Great Britain.
In 1903, Pamela launched her own magazine under the title The Green Sheaf, with contributions by Yeats, Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall
Christabel Marshall
Christabel Gertrude Marshall was a British campaigner for women's suffrage, a playwright and author...
), Cecil French, A. E. (George William Russell
George William Russell
George William Russell who wrote under the pseudonym Æ , was an Irish nationalist, writer, editor, critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years.-Organisor:Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh...
), 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.
In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
gave Smith an exhibition of 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.
Yeats introduced Smith to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced theurgy and spiritual development...
, 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.
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 beautiful examples of her works done in gouache
Gouache
Gouache[p], also spelled guache, the name of which derives from the Italian guazzo, water paint, splash or bodycolor is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. A binding agent, usually gum arabic, is also present, just as in watercolor...
were collected by her cousin, Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
stage actor William Gillette
William Gillette
William Hooker Gillette was an American actor, playwright and stage-manager in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who is best remembered today for portraying Sherlock Holmes....
, and may be found today prominently displayed in the permanent collection at his castle in East Haddam, Connecticut.
In 1911, Smith converted to Catholicism. After the end of the First World War, Smith received an inheritance from an uncle that enabled her to buy a house in Cornwall
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
, an area popular with artists. For income, she established a vacation home for Catholic priests in a neighboring house. She never married, and she died penniless in Bude
Bude
Bude is a small seaside resort town in North Cornwall, England, at the mouth of the River Neet . It lies just south of Flexbury, north of Widemouth Bay and west of Stratton and is located along the A3073 road off the A39. Bude is twinned with Ergué-Gabéric in Brittany, France...
, Cornwall on the 18th of September, 1951. After her death, all of her personal effects, including her paintings and drawings, were sold at auction to satisfy her debts.
The Smith-Waite Tarot
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 concept, the structure of individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he commissioned the talented and intuitive Smith to create the actual deck.
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, and thus that 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. One reason for the enduring success of the Waite-Smith deck may be the richness of symbolic signification that Smith brought to the Minor Arcana.
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
Tarot of Marseilles
The Tarot of Marseilles , also widely known by the French designation Tarot de Marseille, is one of the standard patterns for the design of tarot cards...
(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 Italian Sola Busca Tarot; 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
Florence Farr
Florence Beatrice Emery Farr was a British West End leading actress, composer and director. She was also a women's rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, leader of the occult order, The Golden Dawn and one time mistress of playwright George Bernard Shaw...
(the World).
Smith completed the art for the deck between April and October 1909, a six-month period. This is a short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures (the number claimed by Smith in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909). 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.