If you’re anything like me your first foray into Tarot cards were the highly pigmented images of the “Rider Waite Smith” deck. The first publication of the cards was in 1909. They became public domain in the United States in 1966 and were then published by US Gaming systems, making them highly commercially available and therefore the deck millennials such as myself saw in stores like Barnes and Noble. They are also the most well known partially because they are very expressively drawn, even the minor arcana, which up until that point were more neglected and considered less important. They’re gorgeous illustrations. But what I did not know until recently that a woman of color illustrated them.

Pamela Colman was born in 1878 in London to a Jamaican mother and a British father. They moved to Jamaica when Pamela was 10 when her father took a job there. The family traveled back and forth from London to Jamaica frequently.

At the age of 15 Pamela moved to Brooklyn and enrolled in the newly formed Pratt Institute. However, she was forced to return home to Jamaica when her mother died in 1897. Her father died 3 years after that leaving Pamela alone at the age of 21.

She remained in London after her father’s death and worked as an illustrator, she eventually branched out into theatrical design and became a part of the Lyceum Theatre Group. She later started a weekly salon of artists in her London Studio in 1901. She continued to illustrate pretty prolifically: She illustrated books of Jamaican folklore and illustrated Bram Stoker’s last novel. 1901 also marked the year she joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, introducing her to AE Waite.

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She produced the 78 illustrations that make up the popular tarot deck in just 6 months. For a long time her attributions were hidden and the deck was most often called the “Rider Waite” deck. Recently, there has been a push to recognize her vast work on the deck with the rebranding to “RWS” or “Rider Waite Smith.” Pamela was instrumental in bring this highly visual deck to life. For the Major Arcana she worked from detailed descriptions but for the Minor Arcana (a bulk of the deck) she was simply given lists of meanings and given free rein to create. The minor arcana are my personal favorites of the deck.

Pamela converted to Catholicism in 1911 and after her type of illustration fell out of style following World War I she fell into obscurity. She died in 1951 with no money. Thankfully, she has been the focus of many recent exhibitions including one at Pratt in 2019.