Pamela Colman Smith is the artist who helped A. E. Waite to illustrate the Rider-Waite tarot deck. Born in London, she studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn but never got a degree. She returned to England in 1899 and soon after she was introduced to Waite while joining the Order of the Golden Dawn in early 1900's. Waite is often cited as a sole contributor to the Rider-Waite tarot but the truth is that Pamela Colman Smith had great impact on a design of the cards, especially on the Minor Arcana where she sometimes only loosley followed A. E. Waite instructions. The original drawings are lost. She had never married and her art never got some significant succes in later part of her life so she died poor in 1951 in England, most of her work posthumously sold to cover her debts.