…or was she? There’s more mythology around Pamela Colman Smith than a Greek tragedy. So who was she really? Let’s find out…
Pamela Colman Smith, October 1912 issue of The Craftsman
Was she…black?
Born in London in 1878, Smith was the daughter of Charles Smith and Corinne Colman Smith. Both her parents had come from middle/upper class prominent American families. Her paternal grandfather was Cyrus Porter Smith- a former Brooklyn mayor, and her mother was the sister of the painter and designer Samuel Colman. As a child, Pamela lived for a time in Jamaica when her father took a job out there, and this is where the myth of her being black or mixed ethnicity started.
When she settled in England, Pamela wrote books about Jamaican culture and performed African folk tales, wearing traditional costumes and speaking in patois. She appropriated Jamaican culture based on her lived experience of it. Nowadays of course, cultural and racial appropriation is very problematic, and I hesitate to call Pamela’s act ‘minstrel’ but I suppose it was, really. Yes, she championed black and African culture at a time when doing something like that, as a white woman of her class, was very controversial and potentially dangerous. But, essentially, she wasn’t black. She was a member of the white upper class. So I wanted to dispel this myth first!
Pamela performed for the artistic and literary elites, who demanded anything ‘exotic’ and representations of the colonial ‘savages’ were hugely popular. As a woman, she had to live by her wits and her skills. She was a skilled performer and storyteller par excellence, so I don’t blame her for going down this route to make money!
Image from Pamela Colman Smith – Tarot Artist by Dawn G Robinson, Fonthill Media, 2020
Was she an artist…?
Yes! she was, of course, an artist. This we can’t dispute. Although she is best known for illustrating The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, she was a very successful artist at the turn of the century and did many other things.
Pamela studied art in Brooklyn and there she developed her distinctive visionary style. At the age of 21, she became orphaned, and moved to London where she took up work as an illustrator and theatrical designer. She was quickly absorbed into the bohemian elite in London - Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and Henry Irving all took her under their wing. Terry apparently gave her the nickname she kept all her life ‘Pixie’ and she travelled around the country with the trio, who were all part of the Lyceum Theatre Group, working on very high profile illustration projects.
Pamela was a feminist and an entrepreneur. She set up her own literary magazine called the Green Sheaf and then branched into her own press, wherein she published poems, fairytales and stories by women writers. She even made artwork for the suffrage cause, as she was an avid supporter.
In 1907 Alfred Stieglitz, a prominent photographer and gallery owner, showcased Pamela’s work in his galleries several times. Collectors of her work included famous actor William Gillette.
What a woman may be, and yet not have the Vote – Suffrage Atelier, unsigned circa 1912 (attributed to Smith)
Was she an occultist…?
It’s unclear whether she was a devoted occultist, or just used this connection to find friends in high places.
Smith’s friend William Butler Yeats introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult secret society made up of upper class Bohemians and elites- mainly freemasons. There she met Arthur Edward Waite, and he asked her to design a tarot deck published by Rider and Sons, which became the universally recognised Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Smith took six months to complete the 78 drawings, which are so distinctive that when most people think of the tarot, it’s her images that come to mind immediately. Pamela modelled some of the designs on portraits of her friends. The Queen of Wands card was based on actor Ellen Terry, and The World card on Florence Farr.
Even though she didn’t make much money from it at the time (she was paid a flat rate and Waite took the credit!) the tarot deck was the last commercially successful work of Pamela’s, sadly. As tastes changed, she found her work had little appeal anymore. She converted to Catholicism in 1911 and, ever the entrepreneur and faced with dwindling funds; she set up a holiday home for Catholic priests in Cornwall on the Lizard peninsula!
The new venture didn’t make her as much money as she’d previously enjoyed however, and she was unable to keep it going. She moved to Exeter then finally Bude in the 1940s, and died in 1951 in severe debt. Her possessions were auctioned off to pay for her funeral and she was buried in an unmarked and now long lost, grave. An obscure and sad end for such a talented and unusual person, I think.
To this day, people go in search of Pamela’s grave. She has become a latter-day mystic, an enigma for magic-seekers.
The Rider Waite-Smith deck Major Arcana
Was she gay?
She never married or was publicly linked to any man, and of course, particularly back in those days, this was regarded with suspicion. She shared her home in Cornwall with her widowed housekeeper Nora Lake. But there is no evidence to suggest they were anything more than housemates. This, I think, is just another part of her mystique and aura.
Pamela's house Parc Garland, Bude. Image from Pamela Colman Smith – Tarot Artist by Dawn G Robinson, Fonthill Media, 2020
Fame at last…
It’s only recently that Pamela Colman Smith is getting the attention and recognition that she deserves. The Tarot deck that made her posthumously famous has been renamed by many as ‘Rider-Waite-Smith’ or RWS, because when it was created, it was simply called ‘Rider-Waite’. Pamela’s name and huge contribution was not acknowledged! Even to this day many people still refer to it as Rider-Waite, which I hope will soon change as more people become aware of Colman-Smith.
So, there you have it. We have no proof she was gay, she probably wasn’t massively into the occult, and she definitely wasn’t a woman of colour. But she was a woman who brought a lot of colour to the world. I think it’s fair to say that!
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