British Occult Revival: Pamela Coleman Smith before Waite

Hi I’m Claire Gilman, I’m the Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum. 

Although best known as the illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, Pamela Colman Smith was a prolific draftswoman in her own right, completing numerous book illustrations and theater designs, among other work, in the years before meeting Arthur Waite. She was born in London to American parents and spent most of her childhood travelling between England, the United States, and Jamaica. These diverse cultural experiences strongly influenced her artmaking, which merged folklore and occult traditions. 

After studying briefly at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the late 1890s, Smith returned to London where she became closely associated with leading cultural figures like actress Ellen Terry, author Bram Stoker, and poet William Butler Yeats. It was Yeats who introduced her to the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn through which she met Arthur Waite. In 1909, Waite commissioned her to illustrate his tarot deck. 

Following the completion of the deck, Smith became a member of the Suffrage Atelier, where she contributed poster and cartoon designs for campaigns supporting women’s voting rights. Smith was fiercely independent, and her life and legacy testify to the important role women had in the history of tarot and its place within art and culture at large.