Pamela Colman Smith
Pamela Colman Smith ( born February 16, 1878 in Pimlico, Middlesex, † September 18, 1951 in Bude, Cornwall ) was an Anglo-American artist and author. Her illustrations of the Tarot deck, which she developed with Arthur Edward Waite, were world famous.
Life
Pamela Colman Smith was born as the only child of American Charles Smith and the Jamaican Corinne Colman in Pimlico and spent her first ten years of life in Manchester, where her father was head of a cushion factory. Manchester was at the time the center of Spiritualism, which also Corinne Colman was close. To 1889, the family Colman Smith moved to Jamaica, where Charles Smith was engaged in railway construction. In 1893, Pamela and her father moved to New York. There, Pamela Colman attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a private art school. There she attended painting classes by Ernest Fenollosa and Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow had special influence on Colman Smith's work. It took the then unusual thesis, the painting should not be strictly realistic, but rather a composition of sensations. Thus he advocated the theory of sensory couplings in art, such as the hearing colors or seeing sounds. Colman Smith is from today's perspective have been Synästhestikerin and have possessed the ability to perceive music as colors or shapes, as in her later image series of pieces of music known composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Mozart inspired. However, since she was often sick, she only attended school irregularly and she left in 1897 without a degree. In the same year she exhibited her paintings in the William Macbeth Gallery, where she sold four images.
In 1899 three books were published by her, as a band with their pictures and they went to the Lyceum Lyceum Theatre Companie of London on tour. In December of that year her father died. They teamed up with the actress Ellen Terry and returned to London, where they lived a long time with Terry, whose daughter Edith Craig a lifetime remained friends with Pamela Colman Smith. During this time, she illustrated Bram Stoker's book Lair of the withe Worm in 1903 and some works of William Butler Yeats, who introduced it in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. At the breakup of the Golden Dawn in the same year she followed Arthur Edward Waite in the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn, at the Waite took the lead. In 1904, she designed in collaboration me her friend Edith Graig set the stage for Yeats ' play Where there is nothing, and returned the same year returned to New York.
In 1906 she turned to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who allowed her to exhibit her paintings in his gallery 291. The exhibition in January 1907 was also the first non- photographic exhibition of the gallery. Here, Pamela Colman Smith was able to sell some of her paintings, so two more exhibitions followed in the years 1908 and 1909, which remained without success. She then returned to England. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz in 1909, she mentioned that she had completed her work on the 80 images of the Tarot, but the letter remained unanswered. It remains unclear to this day, to what extent Arthur Edward Waite was involved in the Tarot Cards by Pamela Colman Smith, and what are the two supernumerary pictures that Pamela Colman Smith mentioned in her letter. The maps were published in the same year by the publisher Rider & Son as " Tarot Deck" author is not mentioned, only in an advertisement for the game, the name of Pamela Colman Smith was mentioned.
In subsequent time Pamela Colman Smith took on various jobs, which are mostly concerned to book illustrations. In 1911, she converted to Catholicism, probably preceded by a break with the Isis -Urania Temple. During the First World War she was involved in various charitable organizations have pushed.
In 1918 her late uncle left a small inheritance, which they leased a house in the artists' colony in Parc The Lizard in Cornwall Garland and operational there for a short time a house for Catholic priests. During this time she had only moderate success, what you both on their apparent availability Catholicism, as may also due to their lack of business acumen. In 1942 she moved to Bude, also in Cornwall to where they impoverished and often bedridden spent the last years of her life and died on 18 September 1951. Most of her works have been lost, and the originals of the Rider -Waite Tarot cards. A few images obtained are owned by Stewart R. Kaplan.