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Her friendship with Terry's daughter, Edith Craig, led to collaboration on many costume and stage designs, including those for Yeats's play Where there is Nothing and J.M. Synge's The Well of the Saints. Edith Craig and her friends habitually gave nicknames to members of their circle and it was probably they who first began to call Pamela Smith ...
Aug 26, 2022 · Pamela Colman Smith’s design for the Queen of Wands with Edith Craig as a model. Some of the tarot archetypes are believed to have been modeled by Smith’s friends—Ellen Terry’s daughter ...
Colman Smith quickly became enmeshed in the creative worlds of Terry and her children, Edith and Gordon Craig. Indeed, it was while listening to Gordon Craig play Bach that Colman Smith experienced her first musical vision, which led to her most sustained creative output. She also became a long-time friend and collaborator of Edy Craig.
Alexandra Smith has claimed that Pamela Colman Smith was responsible for designing this production. See A. Smith, ‘Nikolai Evreinov and Edith Craig as Mediums of Modernist Sensibility’, New Theatre Quarterly, 26:3 (2010), 203–16. Colman Smith designed the play programme for the December 1915 Shaftesbury Theatre production.
- Katharine Cockin
- 2015
Smith traveled with, and designed sets for, the Lyceum Theatre Company, working with Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Edith Craig. She also performed small roles in several of the company's productions.
- The Deck
- Her Art
- Her Life
Occultist and scholar Arthur Edward Waite met Coleman Smith at the Golden Dawn, “a western mysticism order they both belonged to,” and asked her to illustrate the tarot deck. It was a task she wrote to friend and gallery owner – who repeatedly featured her art – Alfred Stieglitz, that it was “a big job for very little cash!” The Rider-Waite-Smith t...
Coleman Smith never finished her degree due to a mixture of her mother’s death and her own illness. By the time Coleman Smith was 21, she’d lost both her mother and father. Her father died while Coleman Smith was travelling with Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Bram Stoker, while working on costumes and stage design for the Lyceum Theatre group. Arth...
Coleman Smith was born in 1878 to a Jamaican mother and white American father. Despite being an eccentric spiritualist, Coleman Smith converted to Catholicism by 1911. Catholics “were an oppressed minority in the U.K,” so the move to convert “likely only enhanced her eccentricity” rather than detracted from her witchy ways. Passing away in 1951 fro...
Edith Craig directed the first modern production in 1925 of John Webster's The White Devil (1612). Edith Craig's friend Pamela Colman Smith designed one of the most famous Tarot Card sets. Edith Craig and Pamela Colman Smith designed scenes for a play by W. B. Yeats.
