Pamela Colman Smith Exhibition

Presented in collaboration with the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.

Exhibition (primarily illustrations/works on paper) was divided into:

• Henry Irving and Ellen Terry
• Ireland and the Yeats Family
• Portraits of William Butler Yeats
• Oil painting of W.B. Yeats
• Gelukiezanger, the Teller of Tales
• Drawings and Illustrations
• The Tarot
• Music Pictures and other Drawings

Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 – 18 September 1951), also nicknamed Pixie, was an artist, illustrator, and writer. She studied at Pratt Institute. She is best known for designing the Waite-Smith deck of divinatory tarot cards for Arthur Edward Waite.

Smith wrote and illustrated several books about Jamaican folklore, including Annancy Stories (1902) which were about Jamaican versions of tales involving the traditional African folk figure Anansi the Spider. She also continued her illustration work, taking on projects for William Butler Yeats and his brother, the painter Jack Yeats. She illustrated Bram Stoker’s last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, in 1911, and Ellen Terry’s book on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, The Russian Ballet, in 1913. Through a studio known as the London Suffrage Atelier, she contributed artwork to further the cause of women’s suffrage in Great Britain.

In 1903, Pamela launched her own magazine under the title The Green Sheaf, with contributions by Yeats, Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall), Cecil French, A. E. (George William Russell), Gordon Craig (Ellen Terry’s son), Dorothy Ward, John Todhunter, and others. The Green Sheaf survived for a little over a year, a total of 13 issues.

In 1907, Alfred Stieglitz gave Smith an exhibition of paintings in New York at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (also known as gallery 291), making Smith the first painter to have a show at what had been until then a gallery devoted exclusively to the photographic avant-garde.

Image: Exhibition brochure cover image – informal sketch of Ellen Terry by Pamela Colman Smith