Pamela Colman Smith

Who drew the Rider-Waite tarot?

Pamela Colman Smith drew all 78 cards in 1909, to a plan by the writer Arthur Edward Waite. William Rider & Son published the deck in London that December. A year later Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot printed her designs as plates, and its title page says so: “from designs by Pamela Colman Smith”. Inside, Waite wrote that the cards “have been drawn and coloured by Miss Pamela Colman Smith”. In his preface he praised “a lady who has high claims as an artist” and left her name out.

The deck took its common name, the Rider-Waite, from its publisher and its planner. Many people now say Rider-Waite-Smith, to put her back in. You can see all 78 of her cards on this site, each with a scan of an early printing.

What Waite asked for, and what she made

Waite wanted to “rectify the symbolism” of the old cards, as he put it in 1909. He wrote that the designs were made “under my supervision—in respect of the attributions and meanings”. Of the changes to the old symbols, he said: “I alone am responsible.” Years later he admitted that she “had to be spoon-fed carefully” over three trumps: the High Priestess, the Fool and the Hanged Man.

The other cards seem to have been more her own. In most older decks the numbered cards showed only rows of cups, swords, wands or coins. In this one, Waite wrote, every numbered card, “the Aces only excepted”, has “figures or pictures”, most of them scenes with people. K. Frank Jensen and Robert Place, who have both studied the early deck, think Waite gave her a fairly free hand with these. Look at the black cat at the feet of the Queen of Wands: neither Waite’s book nor the Golden Dawn’s notes on the cards mention it.

Some of her pictures have older models. Her Three of Swords, a heart pierced by three swords, is close to the same card in the Sola Busca, an Italian tarot engraved in the late 1400s. Photographs of the Sola Busca reached the British Museum in London around 1907, and the tarot historian Stuart Kaplan suggested that she saw them there. No letter or note of hers says so. The case rests on how alike the cards are, and on the timing.

“A big job for very little cash”

On 19 November 1909 Smith wrote to Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer who had shown her pictures: “I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash! A set of designs for a pack of tarot cards - 80 designs.”

Her monogram on the cards

Smith signed the cards with a small monogram: a P crossed with a looping C and S. It sits in a corner of nearly every card. The collector K. Frank Jensen thinks the Fool may be the only card without it. Try finding it in the lower right of the King of Wands.

Her life before the tarot

Smith was born in London in 1878 to American parents. She grew up between Manchester, Kingston in Jamaica and New York, and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1899 she published Annancy Stories, Jamaican tales of Anansi the spider, told and drawn by her. That December her father died, and she went back to England.

There she worked with the Lyceum Theatre company of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and designed sets. Terry is said to have named her Pixie. In 1901 she joined the Golden Dawn, the magical order Waite also belonged to. From 1903 she ran her own small magazine, The Green Sheaf. In 1907 Stieglitz gave her a show at his gallery in New York, the first there that was not of photographs.

Her other work

Before the tarot, Smith was known as an illustrator. Her books include Annancy Stories (1899), The Golden Vanity and the Green Bed (1899), Widdicombe Fair (1899) and Chim-Chim: Folk Stories from Jamaica (1905). She edited The Green Sheaf (1903–1904), and in 1908 wrote an essay for The Craftsman, “Should the Art Student Think?”. In 1912 the same magazine wrote about her “pictured music” and printed the photograph above. Each of these is in the timeline below, with a link to a scan or a record.

Was Pamela Colman Smith Black?

People often ask, and no one has shown that she was. Her parents, Charles Edward Smith and Corinne Colman, were in her biographer’s words “wealthy white American expatriate parents”. That biographer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, points to Smith’s “well-documented dark skin” and thinks it “highly likely” that she was biracial, but writes that she has “found no direct evidence” for it. The tarot historian Mary K. Greer thinks “the facts of her life make it near impossible”, and the scholar Thea Wirsching has argued against the idea at length. She did live in Jamaica as a girl, and she retold its stories in two books.

Her last years and her grave

In 1911 Smith became a Catholic. After the First World War an inheritance let her move to the Lizard, in Cornwall, and in the early 1940s she moved to Bude, on the north coast. When she died, in her flat in Bude on 18 September 1951, aged 73, she was in debt and few people knew her work. Her estate came to nothing once the debts were paid.

She was buried on 25 September 1951 in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels in Bude. Her grave was never marked, or its marker has been lost, and the burial records of the time were destroyed in a fire.

Smith in 2026

From June to October 2026 the Morgan Library & Museum in New York showed her deck in its exhibition Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions. In March 2026 Jill Dawson published Pixie, a novel about her life.