By now we are accustomed to the intuitive, narrative imagery on the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot cards. Many assume they were created by a man, like most things of that era. But the most popular deck today, and one that influenced many other subsequent decks, was illustrated by artist Pamela Smith. Her playful illustrations, informed by the Occult, and the Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau movements of the turn of the century, gave the Tarot a more visual narrative for the first time.
Pamela Smith, the Illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Smith’s early years growing up in England and Jamaica in the late 1800s were influenced by Jamaican and African folklore. Her American father was a merchant so the family traveled frequently. By the age of 15, she lived in New York City, attending Pratt Institute where she studied painting and printmaking.
After both her parents died when she was in her early 20’s, Smith moved back to England. There, she became part of the Lyceum Theater group in London, along with contemporary (and Dracula author!) Bram Stoker.
Smith—now nicknamed “Pixie”—was a dynamic artist, stage-designer, publisher, writer, and suffragist. She painted and illustrated books for Stoker and another of her contemporaries, William Butler Yeats, and wrote and illustrated her own books of Jamaican stories. For a year, she was publisher for a magazine called The Green Sheaf. Additionally, she contributed her artwork to the Red Cross during WWI and to the Women’s Suffrage Movement in England.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper called her an “odd artist mystic girl” in a 1904 feature about her and her artwork. Her work was exhibited in 1907 at Alfred Steiglitz‘s Gallery 291 in his first non-photography show.
The Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the Occult, and Synesthesia
Part of her professed psychic ability may have been influenced by synesthesia, a phenomena where sensory experiences become mixed. People with synesthesia may associate music with colors or words with tastes, etc. It was a concept introduced to her at Pratt by her teacher, artist Arthur Dow. As Smith once wrote in a 1908 article, her artwork is a representation of “what I see when I hear music thoughts loosened and set free from the spell of sound”.
Yeats introduced her to The Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult group where she met Arthur Edward Waite. Waite commissioned her to create a medieval-inspired Tarot deck for artists and art appreciators. By now, her illustrations were influenced by her time in the theater. As a consequence, many of the images on the cards appear as actors on a stage, wearing elaborate costumes. In Waite’s autobiography, he wrote that Smith was, “a most imaginative and abnormally psychic artist”.
Previous versions of the Minor Arcana cards had comparatively simple illustrations—the 6 of cups solely depicting six cups, for example. Smith, however, created more elaborate imagery in her deck based on her own intuition and influences. Additionally, she used Waite’s card interpretations, and even some of her friends as inspiration and models for the figures. Most Tarot decks at the time did not have such precise interpretive imagery. Her interpretations have since been emulated many times over in modern interpretations of Tarot decks.
Pamela Smith’s name and artwork have been obscured and forgotten for many decades, in spite of her being a very popular artist at the time. For a time, the deck was just called the Rider-Waite deck.
Some time after Smith created her Tarot deck, she became a Catholic. She never married, and died without money. Only now is she becoming more known historically, her name finally being added to the title of the Tarot deck she illustrated.
references: Hyperallergic, thelilly.com, wikipedia