Borëd | Artist Spotlight | Pamela Colman Smith

Pamela Colman Smith was an Aquarius, born in Britain on February 16, 1878. Her mother was Jamaican, her father a white American. She was known as “Pixie” to her friends and frequented between Britain, the United States, and Jamaica. Colman Smith had artistic influences that included the metaphorical philosophy of the Symbolists and Art Nouveau aesthetics.

By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute, which had been founded six years earlier. There, she studied under the Institute’s chairman, Arthur Wesley Dow. A painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator, Dow introduced Smith to the significant styles and ideas of the day, including Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Smith left Pratt in 1897 without a degree. Her mother had died the previous year, and Smith suffered a spate of illnesses. She soon moved back to London with her father and took up commercial work as an illustrator.

In London, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theater group led by Ellen Terry (who affectionately called her ‘Pixie’), Henry Irving, and Bram Stoker. She traveled around the country with them, working on costumes and stage design. Tragedy struck again when her father died. She was 21 at the time. Despite her personal losses, Smith was able to find some early commercial success in England. In 1901, she established a studio in London and held weekly salons for artists, authors, and actors. All the while, she produced paintings, illustrations, calendars, and posters, and even miniature theater.

When Smith was twenty-eight years old she approached a photographer, asking to have her paintings to be hung in his galleries, which until that point had only exhibited photography. Alfred Stieglitz agreed and the show opened in the winter of 1907 in Manhattan and was the most popular exhibit in the gallery’s two-year history. All of Colman Smith’s work was sold. Stieglitz continued to show her paintings and even photographed them himself, later on selling it for his own benefit.

In 1909, occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite paid Colman Smith a flat fee to illustrate the seventy-eight cards of the tarot. The two knew each other from the Golden Dawn, a western mysticism order they both belonged to. The deck was guided by the first pictorial tarot deck, The 15th century Sola Busca deck. Colman Smith's artistic style was prevalent throughout the reimagined deck. She finished the deck, a total of eighty cards, in just six months. In a letter to Stieglitz, she wrote, “I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash!” Two years later, she composed illustrations for Bram Stoker’s last book, Lair of the White Worm and converted to Catholicism.

Smith was experimental, interdisciplinary, and collaborative long before any of them were fashionable — an intelligent, worldly, and independent thinker with prodigious talent. Still, she died penniless and uncelebrated at the age of 73 in Bude, England. What art was in her possession when she died was sold at auction to pay off her considerable debt. Had it not been for her iconic signature, which she designed while still a student, her name might have been lost forever.

Today, more than 100 million copies of the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck are in circulation in over 20 countries, making it the most popular Tarot deck ever made.

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