Pamela Coleman Smith  (1878-1951)
Pamela Coleman Smith (nicknamed Pixie) was born of American parents in Middlesex England, February 16, 1870. Her childhood years were spent between London, New York and Kingston, Jamaica. During her teens, she traveled throughout England with the theater company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Then she began formal srt training a the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, New York, graduating in 1897.

Although American by birth,  she returned to England where she became a theatrical designeer for minature theater and an illustrator. Around 1903, she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn and began to paint visions that came to her while listening to music. She turned to writing and illustrating books which turned out to be not very profitable.

Pamela Coleman Smith  met Arthur Edward Waite when she was working on her play Where There is Nothing, which became The Unicorn from the Stars'(1907)..In 1909, under the guidance of Waite, she undertook, for a token payment, a series of 78 paintings for Waite's new tarot  pack. These original black and white designs, who drew in the Victorian Art Noveau style of Walter Crane, were published in the same year by William Rider and Son. Who added the color is unknown.

Despite occasional art shows and favorable reviews by critics, the continued slow sale of her paintings and the rejection by commercial publishers, left her deeply disappointed and feeling disillusioned. She died September 18, 1951, broke and unrecognized.

Pamela Coleman Smith would be totally forgotten except for her 78 tarot paintings known as the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. More than six million are in print. She would be astonished and delighted to know that the deck that she illustrate became the most popular tarot deck of all times, becoming the standard against which all other decks are measured.

 

 in her teens

a portrait by Gertrude Kasebier, 1899