The Rider Waite Smith Tarot

In 1909, Waite asked Smith to illustrate a new tarot deck, giving her roughly six months to complete all seventy eight cards. Waite supplied detailed notes for the twenty two cards of the Major Arcana, but the forty numbered Minor Arcana cards, conventionally left as simple suit and number patterns in earlier European decks, were entirely her own invention: she gave each one a full illustrated scene, the innovation that made the deck usable as a stand alone divinatory and meditative tool in a way earlier decks were not.

Smith was paid a single flat fee for the commission and received no royalties from the deck's publication by William Rider and Son or from its enormous later popularity. For decades the deck was known publicly only by the publisher's name and Waite's, with her own contribution largely uncredited outside specialist circles; only in recent decades has scholarship and popular usage caught up to naming it the Rider Waite Smith deck, restoring her place alongside Waite as its co creator. She died in relative poverty and obscurity on 18 September 1951, her belongings auctioned to cover her debts. Modern scholarship, most substantially Stuart Kaplan's 2018 biography, has worked to recover the documentary record of her life and to establish her rightful standing as co-creator rather than mere illustrator, a correction that has only reached wide popular awareness in the last few decades.