meet Pamela "Pixie" Colman Smith

As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to portray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale. ~ Pamela Colman Smith, “Should the Art Student Think?” July, 1908

A year after Arts and Crafts movement magazine The Craftsman published illustrator Pamela Colman Smith’s essay, she spent six months creating what would become the world’s most popular tarot deck. Her graphic interpretations of such cards as The Magician, The Tower, and The Hanged Man helped readers to get a handle on the story of every newly dealt spread.

Pixie - the forgotten Bohemian artist

Colman Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was commissioned by occult scholar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fellow member of the British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to illustrate a pack of tarot cards. 

Peter Bebergal wrote in The New Yorker that Waite “saw magic not as a means to power but as a path toward a higher consciousness.” Colman Smith also brought her own research to the symbolism of the cards. Smith’s life as a career artist contributed in some ways to the obscurity that followed her 1951 death. Steady illustration work and the fact that she dabbled in a wealth of fields have made her legacy difficult to pin down.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot 

The 78 illustrations on the cards cemented certain visuals in modern tarot, accompanying each you’ll find a small monogram of a “P” crossed with a looping “C” and “S.” The letters stand for Pamela Colman Smith, the unsung artist of this popular tarot.

Recently her name has been revived somewhat, as with the 100th anniversary of the Rider-Waite Deck, a Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set - issued by U.S. Games Systems, it comes complete with a biography of the artist by Stuart R. Kaplan.

More importantly, though, her art remains alive every time a card is drawn from the Rider-Waite deck, which should rightfully be called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The most widely used tarot cards, and the first to be mass-marketed in English with original art, are the ones comprising the Rider-Waite tarot deck, first issued in 1909.

Think good thoughts of beautiful things, colors, sounds, places, not mean thoughts. When you see a lot of dirty people in a crowd, do not remember only the dirt, but the great spirit that is in them all, and the power that they represent. ~ "Should the Art Student Think?" by Pamela Colman Smith