An Artist Between Three Countries

Pamela Colman Smith was born in London on 16 February 1878 to upper class American parents and spent her childhood moving between New York and Jamaica, where her family had business interests. Jamaican folklore, music and visual culture left a lasting mark on her later work, and she published collections of Jamaican folk tales alongside a substantial career as a commercial illustrator, mounting her first exhibition in Brooklyn at nineteen and going on to illustrate more than twenty books and to show her work at Alfred Stieglitz's influential New York gallery.

She was drawn into London's theatrical and esoteric circles in the early 1900s, working as a stage designer and joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the milieu through which she came to know Arthur Edward Waite. That connection led, in 1909, to the commission that would define how she is remembered, even though her own broader artistic career continued alongside and after it. Beyond the tarot commission, Smith illustrated books of fairy tales and folklore, designed for the theatre and worked as a book and magazine illustrator across a career that spanned both sides of the Atlantic, and she later ran her own small publishing venture, the Green Sheaf, producing broadsides of poetry and art before financial difficulty forced her to close it.