Pamela Colman Smith and the Question of Credit

For most of the twentieth century the deck was called simply the Rider-Waite, and Smith was paid a flat fee and named in small print if at all; she died in poverty in 1951 and her work was largely forgotten. The renaming to Rider-Waite-Smith, now standard in serious writing, reflects a considerable reappraisal: it is now generally accepted that Smith's contribution went well beyond execution, that Waite left the seventy-eight minor cards substantially to her, and that the deck's enduring power lies in her images rather than in his commentary.

Smith was of mixed Jamaican and English background, worked as an illustrator, folklorist and theatrical designer, and was associated with the suffrage movement; her wider work has been the subject of exhibitions and scholarship since the 2010s. Waite's own book, the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, is deliberately cagey and does not explain much of what she drew.