Colors and backside of the cards according to the first edition from 1909.
This bestselling edition by Koenigsfurt-Urania & AGM-Urania from Germany and Switzerland has been published for more than 20 years now and highly acclaimed for the unsurpassed reprint of the colors of the historic cards of Arthur E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith.
 
The cards were drawn in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction
of Arthur Edward Waite. Smith's vibrant drawings transformed the
standard tarot deck.
 
Pamela Colman Smith
was born February 16, 1878, in Middlesex, England to American parents,
Smith's childhood years were spent between London, New York, and
Kingston, Jamaica. During her teens, she traveled throughout England
with the theatre company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Thereafter,
she began formal art training at Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, graduating
in 1897.


Smith returned to England, where she became a theatrical designer for
miniature theatre, and an illustrator -- mainly of books, pamphlets and
posters. Around 1903, she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1909,
under the guidance of Arthur Edward Waite, she undertook a series of
seventy-eight allegorical paintings described by Waite as a rectified
tarot pack. The designs, published in the same year by William Rider and
Son, exemplify the mysticism, ritual, imagination, fantasy, and deep
emotions of the artist.
 
Arthur Edward Waite
was born in America in 1857, raised and educated as a Catholic in
England. Beginning at the age of 21, Waite pursued research and writing
on psychical and esoteric matters. Soon after joining the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn, he became the Grand Master, and redirected the
focus of the order from magic to mysticism. The Golden Order, whose
structural hierarchy was based on the Kabbalah, is considered the single
greatest 20th century influence on the occult. Waite was a prolific
author of occult texts, works on the Holy Grail, and the body of
mystical knowledge, which comprises the basis of modern Tarot.