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| Pamela Colman Smith |
Biography
Smith was born in Pimlico, Middlesex (now London), England the only child of an American merchant from Brooklyn, Charles Edward Smith and his wife Corinne Colman. The family was based in Manchester for the first decade of Smith's life, but the family moved to Jamaica when Charles Smith took a job in 1889 with the West India Improvement Company (a financial syndicate involved in extending the Jamaican railroad system). The family lived in Kingston, Jamaica, for several years but traveled between Jamaica, London, and Brooklyn, New York.
World War I-era poster encouraging people to buy a bulldog, with proceeds going to benefit soldiers
By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the relatively new Pratt Institute and studied art under the noted artist teacher Arthur Wesley Dow. Her mature drawing style shows clear traces of the visionary qualities of fin-de-siècle Symbolism and the romanticism of the preceding Arts and Crafts movement. While Smith was in art school, her mother died in Jamaica, in 1896. Smith herself was ill on and off during these years and in the end left Pratt in 1897 without a degree and became an illustrator. Her illustration projects in the late 1890s included The Illustrated Verses of William Butler Yeats, a book on the actress Ellen Terry by Bram Stoker, and two of her own books, Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity.
Returning to England in 1899 (the year her father died), she became a theatrical designer for a miniature theatre and continued to work as an illustrator. In London, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theatre group led by Terry (who is said to have given her the nickname 'Pixie'), Henry Irving, and Bram Stoker and traveled with them around the country, working on costumes and stage design.
Smith wrote and illustrated several books about Jamaican folklore, including Annancy Stories (1902) which were about Jamaican versions of tales involving the traditional African folk figure Anansi the Spider. She also continued her illustration work, taking on projects for William Butler Yeats and his brother, the painter Jack Yeats. She illustrated Bram Stoker's last novel, The Lair of the White Worm in 1911, and Ellen Terry's book on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, The Russian Ballet in 1913. She also contributed artwork to further the cause of women's suffrage in Great Britain.
In 1903, Pamela launched her own magazine under the title The Green Sheaf, with contributions by Yeats, Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall), Cecil French, A. E. (George William Russell), Gordon Craig (Ellen Terry's son), Dorothy Ward, John Todhunter, and others. The Green Sheaf survived for a little over a year, a total of 13 issues.
In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz gave Smith an exhibition of paintings in New York at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (also known as gallery 291), making Smith the first painter to have a show at what had been until then a gallery devoted exclusively to the photographic avant-garde. Stieglitz was intrigued by Smith's synaesthetic sensibility; in this period, Smith would paint visions that came to her while listening to music. The show was successful enough that Stieglitz issued a platinum print portfolio of 22 of her paintings and showed her work twice more, in 1908 and 1909. Some Smith works that did not sell remained with Stieglitz and ended up in the Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive at Yale University.
Smith joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1901 and met Waite. When the Golden Dawn splintered due to personality conflicts, Smith moved with Waite to the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn (or Holy Order of the Golden Dawn). In 1909, Waite commissioned Smith to produce a tarot deck with appeal to the world of art, and the result was the unique Waite-Smith tarot deck. Published by William Rider & Son of London, it has endured as the world's most popular 78-card tarot deck. The innovative cards depict full scenes with figures and symbols on all of the cards including the pips, and Smith's distinctive drawings have become the basis for the design of many subsequent packs.
Apart from book illustration projects and the tarot deck, her art found little in the way of commercial outlets after her early success with Stieglitz in New York. Several beautiful examples of her works done in gouache were collected by her cousin, Sherlock Holmes stage actor William Gillette, and may be found today prominently displayed in the permanent collection at his castle in East Haddam, Connecticut.
In 1911, Smith converted to Catholicism. After the end of the First World War, Smith received an inheritance that enabled her to move to Cornwall, an area popular with artists. She never married, and she died in Bude, Cornwall on the 18th of September, 1951. After her death, all of her personal effects, including her paintings and drawings, were sold at auction to satisfy her debts.
The Smith-Waite Tarot
When Smith’s tarot was first published by Rider, in England, in December 1909, it was simply called Tarot Cards and it was accompanied by Arthur Edward Waite’s guide entitled The Key to the Tarot. The following year Waite added Smith’s black-and-white drawings to the book and published it as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. In 1971, U.S. Games bought the right to publish the deck and published it under the title The Rider Tarot Deck. In later editions they changed the name to Rider Tarot and then Rider Waite Tarot. Today most scholars, in order to recognize the importance of Smith’s contribution, refer to the deck as the Waite-Smith Tarot.
Other publishers have issued versions of the deck as well, often changing the coloration (which is rather harsh in the original deck, due to the limitations of color printing at the time). One example is the Albano-Waite tarot, which has brighter colors overlaid onto the same-pen and-ink drawings.
Waite is often cited as the designer of the Waite-Smith Tarot, but it would be more accurate to consider him as half of a design team, with responsibility for the major concept, the structure of individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he commissioned the talented and intuitive Smith to create the actual deck.
It is likely that Smith worked from Waite's written and verbal instructions rather than from sketches; that is, from detailed descriptions of the desired designs. This is how illustrators often work, and as a commercial illustrator, Smith would probably have been comfortable with such a working process. It appears that Waite provided detailed instructions mainly or exclusively for the Major Arcana, and simple lists of meanings for the Minor Arcana or 'pip' cards, and thus that the memorable scenes of the Minor Arcana owe largely to Smith's own invention. The Minor Arcana are indeed one of the notable achievements of this deck, as most earlier tarot decks (especially those of the Marseilles type) have extremely simple pip cards. One reason for the enduring success of the Waite-Smith deck may be the richness of symbolic signification that Smith brought to the Minor Arcana.
Smith completed the art for the deck between April and October 1909, a six-month period. This is a short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures (the number claimed by Smith in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909). The illustrations were most likely done in pen and ink, possibly over a pencil underdrawing (the original drawings are lost so this cannot be determined with certainty at present). They were either colored with watercolor by Smith or colored by someone else after the fact.
The main influences on Smith's and Waite's tarot designs were previous designs. In particular, it appears that Waite took his inspiration for the trumps mainly from the French Tarot of Marseilles (although the oldest date from the 16th century, his model was possibly a Marseilles deck from the 18th century), and for the pips mainly from the 15th century Italian Sola Busca Tarot. It is not unlikely that other Marseilles-type Italian tarot decks from the 18th or 19th century were used as additional models.
(wikipedia)
Pamela is bekend geworden door haar illustraties van de tarot van Waite, maar zij was in haar tijd een bekende illustrator. Hieronder een aantal illustraties:
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