Pamela Colman Smith
| Pamela Colman Smith | |
|---|---|
Pamela Colman Smith, circa 1912
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| Born |
16 February 1878 Pimlico, London |
| Died | 18 September 1951 (aged 73) |
| Resting place | Bude, Cornwall |
| Other names | Pixie |
| Occupation | artist, illustrator, and writer |
| Known for | Waite-Smith tarot deck |
| Parent(s) | Charles Edward Smith, Corinne Colman |
Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 – 18 September 1951), also nicknamed Pixie, was a British artist, illustrator, and writer. She is best known for illustrating the Waite-Smith deck of divinatory tarot cards (also called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite.
Smith was born in Pimlico, part of central London. She was the only child of an American merchant from Brooklyn, New York, 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, but they 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 Smiths lived in the capital, Kingston, for several years, travelling to London and New York.
By 1893, Smith had moved to Brooklyn, where, at the age of 15, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute, which had been founded only six years earlier. There she studied art under Arthur Wesley Dow, painter, printmaker, 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. 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. She became an illustrator; some of her first projects 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 (a reference to Vanity Fair).
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