The Smith-Waite Tarot
When Smith’s tarot was first published by Rider, in England, in December 1909, it was simply called Tarot Cards and it was accompanied by Arthur Edward Waite’s guide entitled The Key to the Tarot. The following year Waite added Smith’s black-and-white drawings to the book and published it as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. In 1971, U.S. Games bought the right to publish the deck and published it under the title The Rider Tarot Deck (because of differences in U.S. and U.K. copyright law, the extent of their copyright in the Waite-Smith deck is disputed). In later editions they changed the name to Rider Tarot and then Rider Waite Tarot. Today most scholars, in order to recognize the importance of Smith’s contribution, refer to the deck as the Waite-Smith Tarot. Tarot writers often refer to the deck with the simple abbreviation of RWS, for Rider-Waite-Smith.
In the century since the deck's first printing, there have been dozens of editions put out by various publishers; for some of these the Smith drawings were redrawn by other artists, and for others the cards were rephotographed to create new printing plates. Many versions have been recolored as the coloration is rather harsh in the original deck, due to the limitations of color printing at the time. One example is the 1968 Albano-Waite tarot, which has brighter colors overlaid on the same-pen and-ink drawings. Some recent U.S. Games editions have removed Smith's hand-drawn titles for each card, substituting text in a standard typeface. Altogether, these decks encompass the full range from editions very closely based on the original printings to decks that can at most be termed 'inspired' by the Waite-Smith deck.
Waite is often cited as the designer of the Waite-Smith Tarot, but it would be more accurate to consider him as half of a design team, with responsibility for the major concept, the structure of individual cards, and the overall symbolic system. Because Waite was not an artist himself, he commissioned the talented and intuitive Smith to create the actual deck.
It is likely that Smith worked from Waite's written and verbal instructions rather than from sketches; that is, from detailed descriptions of the desired designs. This is how illustrators often work, and as a commercial illustrator, Smith would probably have been comfortable with such a working process. It appears that Waite provided detailed instructions mainly or exclusively for the Major Arcana, and simple lists of meanings for the Minor Arcana or 'pip' cards, and thus that the memorable scenes of the Minor Arcana owe largely to Smith's own invention. The Minor Arcana are indeed one of the notable achievements of this deck, as most earlier tarot decks (especially those of the Marseilles type) have extremely simple pip cards. One reason for the enduring success of the Waite-Smith deck may be the richness of symbolic signification that Smith brought to the Minor Arcana.
Smith and Waite drew on a number of sources as inspirations for the deck's designs. In particular, it appears that Waite took his inspiration for the trumps mainly from the French Tarot of Marseilles (although the oldest date from the 16th century, his model was possibly a Marseilles deck from the 18th century). It is not unlikely that other Marseilles-type Italian tarot decks from the 18th or 19th century were used as additional models. For the pips, it appears that Smith drew mainly on the 15th Italian Sola Busca Tarot; the 3 of Swords, for example, clearly shows the congruity between the two decks. In addition, there is evidence that some figures in the deck are portraits of Smith's friends, notably actresses Ellen Terry (the Queen of Wands) and Florence Farr (the World).
Smith completed the art for the deck between April and October 1909, a six-month period. This is a short period of time for an artist to complete some 80 pictures (the number claimed by Smith in a letter to Stieglitz in 1909). The illustrations were most likely done in pen and ink, possibly over a pencil underdrawing (the original drawings are lost so this cannot be determined with certainty at present). They were either colored with watercolor by Smith or colored by someone else after the fact.
Read more about this topic: Pamela Colman Smith