Pamela Colman Smith, Tarot Artist

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) is the artist behind the most renowned tarot deck in the world, the Rider-Waite Tarot. She is a woman whose life is as mysterious and alluring as the strange, beautiful figures she was famous for painting. Born in London to American parents, Smith was a prolific artist and illustrator and outspoken suffragette who mixed with the great and good of the London art world, as well as the highest tier of the city’s acting and literary circles. She was ‘adopted’ by actress Ellen Terry and spent several years among the Lyceum Theatre crowd. Friends like W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker were doubtless intrigued by her work as an exotic storyteller known as Gelukiezanger in bohemian London. Smith always inspired curiosity, and questions regarding her sexuality, ethnic origins and alleged synaesthesia attracted extraordinary interest during her lifetime. The biggest mystery of all, however, is why she converted from mysticism to Catholicism in 1911, removing herself from vibrant London to the isolated Lizard in the west of Cornwall. There, living in relative obscurity, she evangelised Catholicism in a heavily non-conformist area before moving to Bude in her sixties.