This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1904, when Pamela Colman Smith was 26, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said of her, “There is not a page of her life, not an incident, that is not overflowing with romance.”
This did not mean traditional romance. In fact, Colman Smith may never have even had a romantic partner. The Daily Eagle meant, rather, that her life was filled with excitement and mystique — even, perhaps, magic.
That sensibility came through in her work, in particular her hand-painted illustrations for the world’s best-selling deck of tarot cards. Around 100 million copies of the Rider-Waite deck, as it is known, have been sold in more than 20 countries.
Colman Smith was also an author, publisher, once-incarcerated women’s suffragist, world traveler, prolific letter writer, party hostess, public entertainer, storyteller and mystic, who in her later years — before her death in 1951, at 73 — converted to Catholicism and revived a withering chapel in the English countryside.
While she was not a tarot card reader herself, she had always flirted with magic, and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret 19th-century occultist group influenced by Freemasonry.
Through the Golden Dawn she met Arthur Edward Waite, an occult scholar who commissioned her to illustrate the tarot deck he was creating in 1909; she was paid a small one-time fee for many months of work and research.
“Her deck transcends time and space,” Mary K. Greer, the author of “Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for Personal Transformation” (1984), said in an interview, adding, “One hundred years later, it has multicultural overlays that work for everybody.”
Colman Smith spent part of her childhood in Jamaica, which informed her artistic style, said Tamara Scott-Williams, an illustrator who has researched Colman Smith’s life.
“You can read her tarot deck,” Scott-Williams said in an interview, “because each card possesses a complete story. Each card has its symbolism, its imagery, its colors, its characters, its dream, its imagination.”
When the deck was mass-marketed in England, Colman Smith’s name was left off the packaging, but she ensured her legacy in the coiling initials she inked in the corner of each card.
“The Wave” is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“It’s a magical, beautiful, very intuitive work — a lyrical presentation anthropomorphizing nature as women in states of mourning, and that’s immediately engaging,” the Whitney curator Barbara Haskell said in an interview. “Her work hits a nerve in today’s world: In the face of crisis, people really do yearn for an authentic connection to the soul.”
Women imagined as trees and waves are recurring themes in Colman Smith’s art. By the time she was 24, she had been on 25 voyages, doing much of her traveling by sea.
Corinne Pamela Colman Smith, who sometimes went by Pam, Con or Pixie, was born on Feb. 16, 1878, in Middlesex, England, to American parents. Her father, Charles Edward Smith, was a merchant plagued by debt, and her mother, Corinne Colman Smith, acted in drawing room plays.
The family lived between the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. (While the Smiths were white, some who knew Colman Smith later in life suggested she might have been, at least in part, of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent.) Colman Smith attended the Pratt Institute in New York to study art, but bridled at formal instruction and left after two years.
“It was found absolutely impossible to hold her down, fetter her or even guide her,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote.
Though she followed an erratic schedule of sleeping until noon, Colman Smith found success in New York and London. She wrote and illustrated “Annancy Stories” (1899), a collection of folk tales that she learned while listening to nighttime stories told in Jamaican Patois.
From 1902 to 1903, she published poems and drawings with Jack B. Yeats (whose brother was the famed poet W.B. Yeats) in the periodical “A Broad Sheet.” She then created “The Green Sheaf,” a literary magazine for which she hand-painted the art for each copy. From 1904 to 1906, she and a friend, Ethel Fryer-Fortescue, ran the Green Sheaf Press, exhibiting work by women writers and publishing Colman Smith’s second set of Jamaican folk tales in a book called “Chim-Chim” (1905).
In 1907, she became the first artist who was not a photographer to have her work displayed by Alfred Stieglitz in his experimental gallery 291 in Manhattan, where a sizable crowd of high society came to see 72 of her drawings, most of which she called “music pictures.” (Colman Smith had synesthesia, the ability to see images in sound.) She had two more solo shows at the gallery over the next four years.
Also in 1907, she wrote a manifesto, “A Protest Against Fear,” in which she argued that “fear has got a hold of all this land. Each one has a great fear of himself, a fear to believe, to think, to do, to be, to act.”
She urged younger artists, “Try to feel truly one thought, one scene, and make others feel it as keenly as you do — thus is art born.”
After completing her tarot illustrations, Colman Smith turned her attention to the suffragist movement, designing posters and cartoons for London’s militant artist collective known as the Suffrage Atelier. She later joined the executive council of the Pioneer Players, a theater society that produced plays written by women, where she illustrated playbills and designed costumes. She also joined suffrage protests and was jailed at least once.
Later in life she converted to Catholicism, moved to Cornwall and wrote and directed a children’s Nativity play at the chapel she helped resurrect, naming it Our Lady of the Lizard. She spent her remaining days in the English seaside town of Bude.
Throughout her life, she maintained a voluminous correspondence with friends and relatives, her letters filled with exclamation points, underlined intonations, conversational dashes and drawings in the margins. She seemed to be a wily motormouth — hardly finding use for a comma or period, one thought running into the next, without breaking for breath.
“We’d play croquet by moonlight!” she wrote, urging a cousin to visit her in Jamaica. “It’s quite light enough!”
Her outfits, too, were expressive, with what The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called her “love for bizarre and barbaric colors” accentuating her dark features.
By the time she died of a heart ailment on Sept. 18, 1951, at 73, she was destitute, having spent whatever little money she had on lavish dinner parties and church renovations. She was buried in an unmarked grave. But her legacy lingers beyond the confines of an English countryside cemetery.
Alex V. Cipolle, a distant relative of Colman Smith’s and an arts journalist, spent her childhood summers in a mountain home in upstate New York, where about a dozen of Colman Smith’s paintings still hang on the walls, images like a grove of tree people swaying and dancing, and women whose legs turn to mountains and waterfalls.
Her paintings — with their “very interesting, bold, unapologetic lines,” Cipolle said — are reflective of how Colman Smith lived.
“She was this radical feminist — an iconoclast — who was so ahead of her time,” Cipolle added. “I think she would still be radical today.”
Article produced by Amy Padnani. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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