As an exer­cise draw a com­po­si­tion of fear or sad­ness, or great sor­row, quite sim­ply, do not both­er about details now, but in a few lines tell your sto­ry. Then show it to any one of your friends, or fam­i­ly, or fel­low stu­dents, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to por­tray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale.

- Pamela Col­man-Smith, “Should the Art Stu­dent Think?” July, 1908

A year after Arts and Crafts move­ment mag­a­zine The Crafts­man pub­lished illus­tra­tor Pamela Colman-Smith’s essay excerpt­ed above, she spent six months cre­at­ing what would become the world’s most pop­u­lar tarot deck. Her graph­ic inter­pre­ta­tions of such cards as The Magi­cian, The Tow­er, and The Hanged Man helped read­ers to get a han­dle on the sto­ry of every new­ly dealt spread.

Colman-Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was com­mis­sioned by occult schol­ar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fel­low mem­ber of the British occult soci­ety the Her­met­ic Order of the Gold­en Dawn, to illus­trate a pack of tarot cards.

In a humor­ous let­ter to her even­tu­al cham­pi­on, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Alfred Stieglitz, Col­man-Smith (1878 – 1951) described her 80 tarot paint­ings as “a big job for very lit­tle cash,” though she betrayed a touch of gen­uine excite­ment that they would be “print­ed in col­or by lith­o­g­ra­phy… prob­a­bly very bad­ly.”