Pamela Colman Smith
- Rob Vickery
- Jul 7
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 8
The Forgotten Visionary of the Rider Waite Tarot and Her Quiet Passing in Bude
If you’ve ever picked up a tarot deck, chances are it was the Rider Waite Tarot. These cards are everywhere now, from bookshops to online readings to your friend’s kitchen table. The images have become part of how we picture the tarot: the Fool on the brink of adventure, the Hanged Man deep in reflection, the Three of Swords cutting straight to the heart. But behind all of them was one extraordinary woman whose name was almost lost to history.
Pamela Colman Smith, or Pixie as many called her, poured her imagination, her love of folklore, her musical visions, and her spirit into all 78 illustrations. For more than a century, her pictures have helped people make sense of their lives. Her own story is just as powerful as any legend whispered over a flickering candle.
A Life That Crossed Oceans
Pamela was born in London in 1878, the daughter of an American father from Brooklyn and a creative mother with a love of art. Before she was even in her teens, she’d already moved from Manchester to Kingston, Jamaica, where her father worked on railway projects. Living in the Caribbean shaped her. The colours, the stories, the songs, she soaked it all in.
When she was 15, she was back in New York, studying at the Pratt Institute under Arthur Wesley Dow. He taught her that art could be spiritual and symbolic, and that it didn’t have to fit neat categories. But life pulled her off that path. After her mother died in Jamaica, she left Pratt without finishing her studies.
Even so, she didn’t wait for permission to start creating. She wrote and illustrated her own books, including Widdicombe Fair and Fair Vanity. She took on projects for writers like William Butler Yeats and Bram Stoker. She was in her early twenties when she moved back to London, already known for her bold imagination.
A Circle of Creativity
Once she returned to London, Pamela found her people among theatre artists and writers. She designed costumes, created sets, and fell in love with toy theatres, tiny models that let her stage whole worlds.
In 1903, she launched The Green Sheaf, a little magazine filled with poems, folktales, and illustrations. It only lasted a year, but it showed her determination to give space to writers and artists who were often overlooked, especially women. She also started The Green Sheaf Press to publish more stories and poems.
Her weekly gatherings became the stuff of legend. Arthur Ransome, who would later write about London’s bohemian scene, described how her studio overflowed with actors, painters, and dreamers.
Turning Music Into Images
One of the most fascinating parts of Pamela’s work was her synaesthesia. When she listened to music, she didn’t just hear it, she saw colours and shapes. In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz gave her a solo show in New York, making her the first painter to exhibit in his gallery, which had only ever shown photography. He was fascinated by how she turned sound into vision.
By 1912, she had brought her “drawings suggested by music” back to New York. Critics described how she would sit, listening to Debussy or Beethoven, and let her pencil follow what she felt. One review said:
Her method is simple. She is not a musician. While she listens to music, she draws lines suggested by the emotion the music causes. Sometimes they are long and slow, sometimes broken and staccato.
She painted Debussy’s Snow is Dancing as delicate, drifting lines. Beethoven’s Appassionata appeared as a swanlike figure with a woman’s face. One critic called her Litany of Loreto series an example of “imagination of no common order.”
Even when people praised her work, they couldn’t help adding that it was a bit too personal or peculiar. It was the same struggle so many women artists faced, admired but never fully accepted.
The Tarot That Changed Everything
In 1901, Yeats introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society fascinated by ritual magic and symbolism. That was where she met Arthur Edward Waite.
In 1909, Waite asked her to illustrate a new tarot deck. She had just six months to finish seventy-eight cards. Waite gave her notes for the Major Arcana, but the Minor Arcana were all hers.
Before Pamela, most tarot decks showed pip cards as simple arrangements of cups, swords, wands, or coins. She turned them into little stories, scenes of struggle, joy, loss, and hope. That was what made her deck so different and so lasting.
Even so, she was paid only a flat fee, with no royalties. For decades, the deck was known only by the publisher’s name and Waite’s. Her contribution was almost erased.
A Growing Disillusionment
Over time, the disappointments piled up. Publishers rejected her work. Exhibitions came and went without changing her fortunes. In 1914, she confided to a friend that she no longer cared for people. Years before, she had put her feelings into a poem called Alone:
Alone and in the midst of men,
Alone 'mid hills and valleys fair;
Alone upon a ship at sea;
Alone - alone, and everywhere.
O many folk I see and know,
So kind they are I scarce can tell,
But now alone on land and sea,
In spite of all I’m left to dwell.
In cities large - in country lane,
Around the world—’tis all the same;
Across the sea from shore to shore,
Alone - alone, for evermore.
A Final Chapter in Cornwall
In 1911, she converted to Catholicism. After the First World War, she inherited a little money and moved to Cornwall. She set up a holiday home for Catholic priests, living with her close friend Nora Lake on the Lizard Peninsula.
But the world was changing again. Her art and her stories struggled to find an audience. She kept going because she had always kept going. She kept believing in her work even when no one else seemed to.
The Quiet End in Bude
Pamela Colman Smith died in 1951 at seventy-one. She never knew how many lives her tarot cards would touch. She was buried in a pauper’s unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Michael’s and All Angels Church in Bude. Years later, a fire destroyed most of the parish records. All that is left is local memory saying her grave was near the wall beside the woods.
There was no procession, no memorial, no lasting stone to mark the place. For a long time, almost no one knew her name.
Her Magic Lives On
Today, Pamela Colman Smith is finally being recognised. Scholars, tarot readers, and artists have reclaimed her place in history. Exhibitions and books now honour her work and her courage.
Next time you pick up a tarot card, remember her. The woman who could hear music and see colours. The woman who turned loneliness into art. The woman who believed in her vision, no matter how the world treated her.
That is her true magic.
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