Rider-Waite-Smith: The Woman Who Drew the Cards

The deck in your hands has been called the Rider-Waite Tarot for over a century. That name is everywhere. Course titles, YouTube tutorials, tarot books, the little booklet that probably came with your deck. What the name leaves out is the person who actually drew every single one of those 78 cards.

Her name was Pamela Coleman Smith. Her friends called her Pixie. She was mixed race, eccentric, spiritual, and almost certainly queer. She died in 1951, penniless and obscure, with no funeral, no obituary, and her personal possessions sold at auction to pay her debts. I’m telling you this story during Pride Month on purpose.

Who Was Pamela Coleman Smith?

The bio in my deck’s guidebook is the clearest account I’ve come across, so I want to walk through it because it earns its space.

Pamela Coleman Smith was born on 16 February 1878 in Middlesex, England, to American parents. Her childhood years were spent between London, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica. During her teens she travelled throughout England with the theatre company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. She then took up formal art training at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, graduating in 1897. Although American by birth, she returned to England where she became a theatrical designer and illustrator, mainly of books, pamphlets, and posters. Her circle of friends included W. B. Yeats, his brother Jack Yeats, and other notable theatrical and literary figures of the day.

Around 1903, she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn and began to paint visions that came to her while listening to music, particularly Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and Debussy. She wrote and illustrated books, though they found little commercial success. Things turned briefly in her favour in 1907 when Alfred Stieglitz selected her work as the first non-photographic work shown at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York. Thirty-three of her drawings sold. The critics praised her. By the end of that year, her financial situation had worsened again.

And so in 1909, under the guidance of Arthur Edward Waite, she undertook for a token payment a series of 78 allegorical paintings. That series was published by William Rider and Son. It became the deck we now call the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot.

Despite occasional shows and favourable reviews, her work never found a wide audience. She wrote a poem called Alone, which I read aloud during this episode. It captures something of what her life actually felt like.

Alone and in the midst of men,
Alone amid hills and valleys fair,
Alone upon a ship at sea,
Alone, alone, and everywhere.
Oh many folks 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, it is all the same,
Across the sea from shore to shore,
Alone, alone, forever more.

After the First World War, she received a small inheritance and leased a house on the English coast in an artists’ colony called the Lizard. She continued writing and illustrating. Most of it failed to reach publication. During the Second World War she moved to Cornwall. She died on 18 September 1951, at the age of 73, penniless and obscure, with no funeral, no memorial service, and no obituary in any local newspaper. Her grave, if one exists, remains unknown. Her personal possessions, her books, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, furniture, even her personal letters, were sold at auction to satisfy her debts. Her companion and heir was left with nothing.

What She Brought to the Cards

The fact that she trained at the Pratt Institute matters more than it might seem. She was a woman of colour in the late 1800s. Getting proper art training was an incredibly big deal. She came up through theatre, designing sets and costumes, moving in a world filled with artists, mystics, and queer misfits.

She grew up on Anansi stories. Her first book was called Anancy Stories, her retellings of Jamaican folk tales about the spider trickster from West African and Caribbean folklore. They were tales of a clever underdog who beats bigger, stronger enemies using wit instead of force. They had travelled from West Africa to the Caribbean through the slave trade, and she had heard them as a child in Jamaica.

She also had synaesthesia. Her senses crossed over: she heard sound as colour. You can feel that in the cards. They are alive in a way that earlier tarot simply was not. Before the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the minor arcana did not look like this. You did not get 78 illustrated scenes. You got pip cards: six swords arranged on a page, ten cups in a row, four wands in a stack. Pamela Coleman Smith changed that. Every single card in the minor arcana became a fully illustrated scene, a moment in time, a story you could step into. That was Pixie.

Waite’s Ideas, Pixie’s Heart

Arthur Edward Waite did provide guidance. If you read The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which contains the notes he wrote about this deck, you can see that for the major arcana he wrote two or three pages per card. For the minor arcana, he gave her barely a paragraph each.

And she filled it. She brought her intuition, her connection to whatever you want to call the divine, and her experience as an artist and storyteller. Look at the tongue of the lion licking the hand of the figure in the Strength card. She added that. That tenderness and specificity, the ability to take a deep esoteric symbol and make it readable to someone sitting with the cards in 2026, over a hundred years later: all of that was down to Pixie.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Pamela Coleman Smith did not marry. She had a female companion named Nora Lake, who she attempted to leave everything to in her will, though her debts made that impossible. Some of her closest friends were Edith Craig and Christopher St John, who were a lesbian couple. Edith Craig is believed to have influenced the imagery in the Queen of Wands, though that is slightly disputed.

Nothing is officially confirmed. We go off the stories. But when you hold this deck, you might actually be looking at Edwardian queer people hidden in plain sight, placed there by a gay Black woman in the early twentieth century. That is not a small thing.

£50 and Not a Scrap More

She was paid a flat fee of £50, with no royalties and no credit. The deck was named for the publisher, Rider, and the man who commissioned it, Waite. The artist who drew all 78 cards was not mentioned.

The deck has been printed millions of times. It made a significant amount of money for the publishing company. And the artist died without a penny to her name. It would be easy to say that was just how it was back then. But that is the entire point. She was a woman. She was mixed race. She was eccentric and spiritual. She did not marry. She did not follow the script. She was everything that Edwardian society wanted to pretend did not exist. So they kept the work and forgot the person.

How Her Name Came Back

There was no formal reinstatement. No consortium of tarot authorities voted to restore her. What happened was simpler: tarot readers, queer people, and feminists starting in the 1970s just started talking about her. And slowly, the Rider-Waite Tarot became known as the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, or the Smith-Waite Tarot, or in some circles just Pamela’s deck.

Queer people have always been part of tarot. From Pamela Coleman Smith in the early twentieth century, to Rachel Pollack later in the century, to thousands of queer tarot practitioners working today. We have always been here. We have always created. And for much of that time, we have been erased. Reclaiming Pixie’s name is a refusal to let that erasure stand.

Next time you lay out a spread, next time you reach for this deck, say her name. The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Or just Pamela’s drawings.