Pamela Colman Smith

Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 – 16 September 1951), nicknamed "Pixie", was a British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the Rider–Waite Tarot (also known as the Rider–Waite–Smith or Waite–Smith Tarot) for Arthur Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the most widely used today. Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused on women writers.

Smith was born at 28 Belgrave Road in Pimlico, then in the county of Middlesex but now in the City of Westminster within central London. She was the only child of a merchant from Brooklyn, New York (before it was part of New York City), Charles Edward Smith (son of Brooklyn mayor Cyrus Porter Smith), and his wife Corinne Colman (sister of the painter Samuel Colman). The family was based in Manchester for the first decade of Smith's life. In 1889, they moved to Jamaica when Charles Smith took a job with the West India Improvement Company, a financial syndicate involved in extending the Jamaican railroad system. The Smiths lived in the capital, Kingston, for several years, traveling to London and New York.^{[citation needed]}

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 art under Arthur Wesley Dow, painter, print maker, photographer, and influential arts educator. 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.

In 1896, while Smith was in art school, her mother died in Jamaica. Smith herself was ill on and off during these years and in the end left Pratt in 1897 without a degree. She became an illustrator; some of her first projects included The Illustrated Verses of William Butler Yeats, a book on actress Dame Ellen Terry by Bram Stoker, and two of her own books, Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity (a reference to Vanity Fair).

In 1899 her father died, leaving Smith orphaned at the age of 21. She returned to England that year, continuing to work as an illustrator, and branching out into theatrical design for a miniature theatre. 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.

In 1901, she established a studio in London and held a weekly open house for artists, authors, actors, and others involved with the arts. Arthur Ransome, then in his early 20s, describes one of these "at home" evenings, and the curious artistic circle around Smith, in his 1907 Bohemia in London.

Smith wrote and illustrated two books about Jamaican folklore: Annancy Stories (1899) and Chim-Chim, Folk Stories from Jamaica (1905). These books included 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.

Smith supported the struggle for the right to vote, and through the Suffrage Atelier, a collective of professional illustrators, she contributed artwork to further the cause of women's suffrage in Great Britain. Smith also donated her services for poster designs and toys to the Red Cross during World War I.