The Woman Who Drew
a World of 78 Cards

01 · BEFORE TAROT

She was an unusual artist
before she was “the Tarot artist”

Pamela Colman Smith was born in Pimlico, London, in 1878.

Her childhood moved among Britain, the United States and Jamaica. In 1893 she began studying art at the Pratt Institute in New York. Pratt’s own exhibition history presents this as the beginning of her artistic career.[1]

PIMLICO, 1878 — BUDE, 1951

Yet her work was never limited to “making pictures.” It encompassed illustration, stage design, costumes, books, poetry, a magazine, folklore, recitation and publishing.

She would have an enormous effect on Tarot history, but Tarot was only one part of her creative life.

02 · STORIES FROM JAMAICA

Turning Jamaican stories
into words and pictures

Her earlier work shows that, long before Tarot, she was already committed to making stories visible.

In 1899, while still in her early twenties, Smith published Annancy Stories, a collection of Jamaican Anansi tales for which she supplied both the telling and the illustrations.[2]

In 1905 she followed it with Chim-Chim: Folk Stories from Jamaica. A copy remains in the Library of Congress.[3]

She was not merely an illustrator who transcribed someone else’s instructions. She listened, absorbed a tale and remade it as figures and settings. She had practised that art for years before Tarot entered the picture.

03 · THE LITTLE STAGE

Each card became
a little stage

Smith was also deeply involved in theatre. She moved among theatre people, including the celebrated actress Ellen Terry, and worked on costume, scenery and illustration. Pratt likewise lists set and costume design among her major activities.[1]

The National Trust collections still preserve Smith’s pictures of Ellen Terry and humorous records of life on tour with a theatre company.[4]

Look at the later RWS cards and people stand, meet, walk, offer something, slump, struggle or gaze into the distance. A posture and a few props are enough to make us wonder what is happening.

For an artist formed in the theatre, turning each card into a little stage may have felt entirely natural.

04 · MUSIC PICTURES, 1907

When she heard music,
pictures appeared

One body of work is especially revealing. Smith made pictures while listening to music.

In 1907, photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her work at his famous New York gallery, 291. Pratt describes Smith as the first non-photographer to show there. The show comprised seventy-two symbolic watercolours, including the images prompted by music that came to be called her “music pictures.”[1][9]

MUSIC BECOMES IMAGE · 1907

The Smithsonian American Art Museum preserves a 1907 watercolour that arose from Beethoven’s Egmont overture.[5]

She did not render sound as notation. She turned what she received from sound into another story. That resembles the Tarot task of making an invisible “meaning” into a visible scene.

05 · THE FIVE OF CUPS

She did not explain “loss.”
She made it felt

Write only the word “loss” and it may not remain in the mind.

Instead, draw a person bowed beneath a black cloak. Three cups lie spilled in front. Behind, outside the figure’s sight, two remain upright. In the distance are a river, a bridge and a building.

FIVE OF CUPS · 1909

This is no longer only a label. Someone grieves and looks only at what has gone. Yet something remains, and a bridge reaches the farther bank. A single look at the card releases several possible stories.

What Smith did was to give meaning
a place, a person and a moment.

07 · AN IMPORTANT CAUTION

She was not the first.
The work was still revolutionary

One historical caution matters here. Smith was not the first person ever to give the Minor Arcana pictured scenes.

In late-fifteenth-century Italy, the remarkable Sola Busca Tarot did just that. Its Minor Arcana contain specific figures and actions. The British Museum records a complete set of seventy-eight prints from about 1491, while the Metropolitan Museum describes it as the earliest complete example to survive.[6][7]

In countless decks today, the Five of Cups still inherits a grieving figure, spilled cups and cups left standing. The V&A likewise notes that many later decks continue to use Smith’s symbolism.[8]

Her work was revolutionary not because no one had pictured the minors before, but because her pictures became a shared visual vocabulary for those who came after.

08 · WAITE AND SMITH

How much did Waite tell her
to do?

Was a card Waite’s idea or Smith’s? The two contributions cannot be divided perfectly.

Waite supplied detailed directions for the symbolism and composition of the Major Arcana. For the Minor Arcana, Smith had far greater freedom. The V&A describes her as receiving a “blank slate” there.[8]

The stance of the figure in the Five of Cups, its landscape, atmosphere and implied story therefore contain a great deal of Smith’s own imagination.

Waite handed over ideas; Smith built a world. Seen this way, the familiar name “Waite deck” cannot be quite enough.

09 · THE BIG JOB, 1909

Seventy-eight pictures:
a big job for little money

In 1909, Smith worked through twenty-two Major Arcana and fifty-six Minor Arcana: seventy-eight cards in all, almost every one an independent picture.

On 19 November, having finished, she wrote to her old friend Alfred Stieglitz and called it:

“a big job for very little cash!”

Those seventy-eight pictures would spread around the world, be imitated beyond counting and become the groundwork for new decks. At the time, however, they were for Smith a large task that paid very little.

10 · THE NAME RETURNS

The missing name,
and a life larger than Tarot

For years, her name commonly disappeared from the name of the deck, which was usually called the Rider–Waite Tarot.

Increasingly, people now say Rider–Waite–Smith or Waite–Smith to acknowledge the work she performed. That is why this series has used RWS from the beginning.

The Whitney Museum library catalogue likewise records the deck as the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck.[10]

The S is not an optional extra. It names the person who made this Tarot into a world we can see.

BEYOND TAROT · 1907

Smith did not draw a Tarot and then cease to create. She made books, published a magazine, worked in theatre, supported women’s suffrage and continued to paint. No single title contains her work.[1][9]

She died in 1951 in Bude, Cornwall, aged seventy-three. For many years her name remained in Tarot’s large shadow. In recent decades museums, universities, scholars and Tarot users have begun to look at her again.

11 · MEANING BECOMES STORY

The person who turned
“meaning” into “story”

Throughout this series, we have met people who gave Tarot meaning.

Smith turned those currents into scenes that human beings could see and feel.

Grief, doubt, conflict, rest, encounter, departure, joy, loneliness and hope entered the Minor Arcana as parts of everyday human life.

That means we can look before we know every doctrine. We can think, “That person feels like me just now,” and begin from there. For Tarot, this was an enormous change.