The best-known tarot pictures were drawn in London in 1909. The artist was Pamela Colman Smith, a British illustrator who drew all seventy-eight cards in a single commission for the occult writer Arthur Edward Waite. William Rider & Son of London published them that same year. The pictures crossed the Atlantic a few years later through Lauron William de Laurence, a Chicago publisher. His firm reprinted them from 1916, and the 1918 Illustrated Key to the Tarot carried them under his name on the title page, not the artist's name.

Smith drew every card. Waite supplied the symbolic framework. Rider printed the deck in London, and de Laurence reprinted it for a new continent. This is the story of how those four roles became tangled, how the pictures work, and how the artist's name was slowly given back.

What is esoteric art?

Esoteric art is the name people give to pictures made to carry meanings beyond what they show: images built on the systems of symbols worked out by mystical, occult and divinatory traditions. There is no single esoteric style. A Renaissance astrological diagram, a nineteenth-century alchemical emblem and a twentieth-century tarot card look nothing alike, yet each is arranged so its figures, objects, numbers and positions can be read. Tarot is among the most structured of these systems. Every card fixes certain elements in a certain relationship, and for more than a century the deck that has defined how people picture those relationships is the one Pamela Colman Smith drew.

People sometimes speak of tarot as if it were an unchanged ancient tradition. The real history is more interesting. The earliest references to tarot all come from the 1440s and 1450s, in the northern Italian cities of Venice, Milan, Florence and Urbino, where the cards were made for a game played in tricks, one that has probably changed little since. The painted Visconti-Sforza tarot, made in Milan around 1450 to 1480 and now preserved at the Morgan Library, survives in thirty-five of its original seventy-eight cards, and it was made for noble entertainment, not for fortune tellers.

Tarot's occult meaning came later. The French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin put the idea into print in 1781, claiming the cards concealed ancient wisdom, and his claim became the foundation of the interpretive tradition people know today.

By the late nineteenth century that tradition ran through a British occult revival whose centre was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Smith joined the order in 1901 and met Waite there, and when the order split she moved with him to its independent and rectified rite. The tarot commission of 1909 grew out of those shared years, but the artist Waite hired had a creative life of her own long before the deck.

Who drew the cards for A. E. Waite?

The artist was Pamela Colman Smith, known to her friends as Pixie, and she came to the tarot as a working illustrator. Born in Pimlico, London, in 1878, she moved to Kingston, Jamaica, as a child while her father worked on railway projects, and at fifteen she was studying at the Pratt Institute in New York under the painter and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow. She had early success exhibiting with Alfred Stieglitz in New York, and she supported herself through theatre, storytelling and book illustration, the kind of work that trains exactly the skill her cards would need: placing figures in a scene so a picture can carry a narrative.

Life after that early success was thinner than it should have been. Her art found little commercial outlet beyond book illustration and the tarot deck, and the deck's later fame never reached her while she lived. She wasn't Waite's assistant. She was an illustrator he hired, and one with a style already fully formed.

In 1909 the commission came. The division of labour is clear in the published record. Waite supplied the symbolic framework, the meanings and correspondences the pictures were meant to carry. Smith did all the drawing, and each of the seventy-eight images is hers. The title page of Waite's illustrated guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, states it plainly: the book contains seventy-eight plates 'from designs by Pamela Colman Smith'.

Even the cards themselves carry her name in miniature. Every one bears a small monogram, a P crossed with a looping C and S, worked into the picture, and it survives in reprints to this day. Her correspondence and documents are gathered in the 2018 biography of her life.

Why were illustrated suit cards important?

William Rider & Son of London published the deck in 1909 as a complete set of seventy-eight: the twenty-two major arcana, the named figure cards running from the Fool to the World, and the fifty-six minor arcana in the four suits of wands, cups, swords and pentacles. The structure was centuries old by then. What was new was what Smith did with the second half.

On earlier printed decks the numbered suit cards usually showed little more than their emblems repeated: three cups arranged on a card, three coins, three swords. The Marseille tradition that dominated European printing showed the suits instead of telling stories with them. She drew the numbered cards just as she had drawn the named cards: each became a complete scene, built from objects and symbols that could be read. A few earlier decks had gestured in that direction, but the Rider deck made it the rule. That change is why a modern reader can take a Seven of Swords from the deck and see not only blades but somebody doing something.

Her solutions varied card by card: the Six of Cups shows two figures exchanging cups, and the Three of Swords reduces the scene to a heart pierced by three blades.

The colours were part of the original design, and Waite's writing followed quickly. His unillustrated Key to the Tarot appeared in 1909 beside the deck, then The Pictorial Key to the Tarot in 1910, dated 1911, with its seventy-eight plates from Smith's designs. The pictures had been published in London, with Smith named as the artist, before any American reprint existed. The Chicago editions didn't introduce these images. They took them.

What do the Magician and the Star show?

The Magician shows Smith's method as clearly as any card in the deck. The design she made in 1909, which the American editions reproduced a decade later, is a single full-length figure standing behind a table, drawn in strong black outlines against a radiant golden-yellow ground. The wand, the cup, the sword and the pentacle sit on that table, the four suit emblems gathered into one organised scene rather than scattered as labels. Waite's commentary treats the card in terms of will and action, and the drawing matches his account: the figure stands over the tools, everything assembled and ready. The same design survives in this this reproduction of the Magician, its outlines and golden ground intact.

The four emblems work here as a visual relationship, not as four separate labels. One table, one figure, four objects: the arrangement proposes that the suits belong to a single ordering system, something a figure can stand over and set in motion. The strong black lines carry the image, simplifying the shapes until the whole card becomes almost heraldic.

The Magician and the Star turn an idea into something a figure does. Where the Magician assembles objects, the Star gives one figure a single continuous action: a kneeling figure pours water beneath a cluster of yellow stars. The composition is vertical and balanced, with minimal shading and a parchment-like beige ground, and the palette is mostly black, beige and yellow. Waite reads the card through the old image of the water of life and the gifts that flow from it, and Smith's design belongs to that reading because it makes the abstract visible. Water is being poured. That's a gesture a viewer can remember the way one remembers an action rather than a doctrine, and the print of the Star keeps the gesture intact.

How do the Fool and the Moon create a visual story?

The Fool is Smith at her most economical: a single figure in profile, stepping forward while a small dog moves at his side, all of it set against a radiant yellow ground. There is no furniture, no architecture. The card keeps the scene to the walking figure and his dog. The Fool is treated in the Pictorial Key as spirit setting out in search of experience, and the drawing does exactly what that interpretation asks: it shows movement already begun, a step taken. This Fool print keeps that restraint.

The Fool is a person in action. Her Moon is a place. The moon dominates the top of the card, and below it two dogs howl on either side of a winding path that runs between twin towers. Instead of centring a human figure, the design arranges a landscape that draws the eye from landmark to landmark: the moon overhead, then the dogs, then the path, then the towers. Waite places the card in the territory of imagination and the road into the unknown, and the drawing gives that idea a visible sequence, a route a viewer can follow without knowing what each landmark is supposed to mean. All of it is present in this print of the Moon.

Why could the deck be reprinted in Chicago?

While Smith was drawing cards in London, a different kind of business was growing in Chicago. L. W. de Laurence ran de Laurence, Scott & Co., an occult publishing house that sold books, manuals and ritual supplies, most of them by post. His was a commercial operation built on printed pages, not on any artistic practice of his own. The tarot images entered his catalogue as products, the way instruction manuals and incense did.

The reprint was possible for a plain legal reason: Rider's deck carried no protection under American copyright law, so the pictures could be reproduced across the Atlantic without permission. Being allowed to reprint the deck in the United States and naming the artist were two separate questions.

In 1916 de Laurence published a facsimile of Waite's guide under his own title, The Illustrated Key to the Tarot: The Veil of Divination. Two years later the firm issued an enlarged volume that retained the 1916 title and carried a 1918 copyright. It's that later book whose date now appears on so many prints of these cards. Its title page reads 'By L. W. de Laurence'. The London artist's name didn't appear beside his on the title page.

He published the drawings, never drew them. That was the whole of his part in the drawings.

What did the 1918 illustrated book contain?

The 1918 volume, The Illustrated Key to the Tarot, The Veil of Divination, was issued from Chicago with a title page naming L. W. de Laurence, the De Laurence Company and a copyright to de Laurence, Scott & Co. It was through this book, and the catalogue behind it, that the London drawings reached a readership far larger than the original British printing ever had.

The heart of the book wasn't new. Its organisation, its symbolic explanations and its images all descend from Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot. What the Chicago firm did was take an existing, successful guide and put it back on the market in its own editions. The text carries its origin inside it: a note in the body of the book records that 'the Tarot cards were drawn and colored by Miss Pamela Colman Smith', and that they're reproduced as a means of reference to the text.

So Smith is there, buried in the prose. The title page belongs to de Laurence alone, and library catalogues take a book's author from its title page. Her credit is a sentence in the body, not the name the catalogue records.

A publisher who reprints a guide hasn't commissioned a deck. The 1918 book reproduced designs that already existed and had already been published in London. When a modern print of one of these cards carries the year 1918, it carries the date of that American binding, not the date the picture was drawn.

How far did the Chicago publishing business reach?

De Laurence's influence came less from any single title than from the catalogue system around it. The firm was a pioneer of supplying magical and occult goods by mail, and the combination of books and ritual supplies built a customer base that reached far beyond the Midwest. Somebody who lived nowhere near an occult bookshop could order the firm's books and goods by post, and a name printed on a title page became, over years, a brand.

In the Caribbean, his name had particular influence. The historian Owen Davies has written that the de Laurence name achieved mythical status there, and the firm's manuals became part of a long exchange between American publishing and local spiritual practice. The catalogue reached places the Chicago shop itself never did.

The weight of the name shows in official action. In 1964 a Jamaican woman named Cindy Brooks was arrested for receiving parcels from the United States, one of which contained an envelope labelled De Laurence. Jamaican customs law prohibited imports of de Laurence publications relating to divination, magic, cultism and the supernatural arts. A publishing house doesn't get itself written into a customs ban by staying small. By mid-century the Chicago name was famous enough that an island state regulated against its pages.

What became of Smith and the publisher?

Smith's life continued long after the deck, mostly away from its later fame. She became a Catholic, settled in Cornwall, and spent her last years in the seaside town of Bude, where she died on 16 September 1951. The authors of her 2018 biography believe she was probably buried in an unmarked grave at St Michael's, the local parish church, and the records that could confirm it were destroyed in a fire. The woman who drew some of the most reproduced images on earth lies in a grave nobody can now point to.

After the deck, Waite kept writing on occult subjects and the traditions he had helped reshape, and in late life he set down an autobiography. He died in London on 19 May 1942, nine years before Smith.

In 1936, de Laurence died in Chicago on 11 September and left the business to his son Velo. The firm didn't die with him, and it still operates today as the DeLaurence Company.

How did Smith regain recognition for the deck?

The images outlived all three of them. In the 1960s and 1970s a new tarot revival carried the deck to a public that knew nothing of Chicago or Bude, and in 1971 US Games Systems began publishing its Rider-Waite editions. In the decades since, those editions have made Smith's drawings the standard tarot imagery of the English-speaking world and far beyond. When that first US Games printing appeared she had been dead for twenty years. Through her reproduced cards, a nearly forgotten illustrator kept reaching readers.

The correction was slow and partly scholarly. In 2018 US Games published Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story, a biography by Mary K. Greer, Stuart R. Kaplan, Elizabeth Foley O'Connor and Melinda Boyd Parsons. The book runs to 440 pages with over 400 colour images of her non-tarot work, and it gathers her documents, correspondence and photographs, with a bibliography of 525 entries. It did what no tarot edition could: it put the artist's whole life before the public, the deck as one episode in a much longer career.

Naming followed the scholarship. Some scholars, publishers and readers now use Waite-Smith or Rider-Waite-Smith, each name marking a real role: Waite the symbolic collaborator, Rider the London publisher, Smith the artist. Many editions are still sold as Rider-Waite. For the centenary of the deck, US Games went further and issued a Smith-Waite edition that puts the artist first and leaves the publisher out. None of this changes a single line of the drawings. It simply gives the hand behind the cards its own name back, a century after the work was first set down.

Choosing a tarot print for your wall

If the story makes you want one of these cards on your own wall, the Sun is the one I would hang. It's the deck's most straightforwardly joyful picture: a radiant sun over a child riding a white horse, a garden and a low wall around them. This print of the Sun carries it with bold black outlines and warm yellows. Every tarot card carries meaning, but the Sun also carries daylight, and a room notices it. It's a picture you can enjoy before you read a single symbol, and one whose symbols reward the reading.

How big to go depends on where it will hang. On its own, we'd take it at A2 in a black aluminium frame, so the bright ground has enough space to be the main picture on the wall. In a small group of pictures, an A3 print in a light pine wood frame works better, especially on pale walls. If one card isn't enough, there are more tarot prints in the collection of esoteric art.

Every copy we make begins with a hand-restored image, worked carefully so the original design and colours stay as close to the source as we can keep them. Each one is printed in our Barcelona workshop on 230 gsm fine art matte paper with archival pigment inks. That care matters particularly for these cards, whose strength has always been flat, confident colour and clean black line. What you hang is the image as it was first drawn, and the small PCS monogram in the picture is Pamela Colman Smith's own mark.

Did you know?

• Arthur Edward Waite, the British mystic who commissioned the deck, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1857.
• J. Pierpont Morgan bought the Visconti-Sforza cards in 1911, two years after Smith's deck appeared.
• One account records that Smith had six months to draw all seventy-eight cards and was paid a flat fee, with no royalties.
• The deck is in the public domain in countries whose copyright term is life plus seventy years or fewer, including the United Kingdom, where it first appeared.
• The Pictorial Key to the Tarot helped popularise the Celtic Cross layout.
• Before the publishing business, de Laurence lectured on and demonstrated mesmerism and hypnotism in Chicago and Pittsburgh.
• The family headstone at de Laurence's grave in Illinois spells the surname Lawrence.

Questions about de Laurence and the tarot deck

Who drew the Rider-Waite tarot cards? Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight images in London in 1909. Waite supplied the symbolic framework and the commission, the drawing was hers throughout, and every card still carries her small PCS monogram. The nickname Pixie, which follows her around tarot circles, was what her friends called her.

Why is L. W. de Laurence's name attached to the deck? Because his Chicago firm republished the pictures, and the title page of the 1918 Illustrated Key to the Tarot names only him. The book's own text credits Smith with drawing and colouring the cards. He was the publisher of an American edition, never the artist.

What does esoteric art mean? It's art made to be read, not just seen, using symbols from mystical, occult and divinatory traditions. The Waite-Smith tarot designs are among the esoteric prints in our Esoteric collection.

How old is the tarot deck? As a game, tarot goes back to the 1440s, when painted decks appeared in northern Italian cities. The occult meanings people associate with the cards came much later: Antoine Court de Gébelin put the idea into print in 1781, and the nineteenth-century revival built on it. Waite and Smith's deck of 1909 is recent in that long view, which is part of what makes its imagery feel so deliberate.

What is the difference between the Rider-Waite and the Waite-Smith deck? Usually none: the names point to one set of seventy-eight drawings. Rider-Waite takes its name from the publisher and the collaborating author, while Waite-Smith, Rider-Waite-Smith and the centennial Smith-Waite also include the artist's name.

Where can I read the original 1918 book? The full text of de Laurence's Illustrated Key to the Tarot is free to read at Project Gutenberg, and digitised copies of the earlier printings sit on the Internet Archive. Published before 1931, the book has entered the American public domain, so you can compare the title page and the buried artist's credit for yourself.

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About the author

At Moryarty we restore vintage artwork by hand, working to keep every original design and colour as close to the source as we can, and we print everything in our own Barcelona workshop on fine art matte paper. The tarot cards hold a special place for us because their history is a lesson in looking carefully at who made what. Read a small signature, a title page or a date, and the story a picture tells changes. We find our posters in libraries, museums, online collections, private collections and markets. Moryarty was founded in 2015 and has more than 2,000 vintage posters.

Sources

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• Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, The Morgan Library & Museum
• The Illustrated Key to the Tarot (1918), Project Gutenberg
• Pamela Colman Smith, Wikipedia
• Cindy Brooks, Jamaica 1964, Obeah Histories
• Book explores the life and work of Pamela Colman Smith, The Post