The room smelled of boiled coffee and turpentine; the single lamp threw a warm pool of light across a battered oak table where a woman with a sketchbook and a handful of theatre stories worked late into the night.
Corinne Pamela Colman Smith signed her letters “Pixie,” wore beads and borrowed costumes to charm an audience, and when music played she let the sound guide her brush. She gave the modern tarot its face, designing the esoteric images on the most popular tarot deck in existence today.
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She painted like someone improvising on stage, conjuring characters from a memory of stories heard in Kingston and of plays seen in London. By 1910, those pictures were pressed into a pocket-sized book of mysteries and sold with Arthur Edward Waite’s guide.
Yet when she died in 1951, the auctioneer’s hammer finished what the market had started — her possessions were sold to pay debts while her images went on to outshine her name. The images survived as the Rider-Waite tarot deck, but the woman died penniless.
EARLY LIFE AND ART TRAINING
Born in 1878 to an American father and a Jamai
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