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Pamela Colman Smith’s work has appeared here before but this is an example of her early illustration I hadn’t seen until now. Annancy Stories (1899) was written and illustrated by Smith, being her own presentation of the Jamaican versions of the Anansi trickster stories. Smith’s mother was Jamaican, and the family lived in Kingston for [...]

Detail from Assassination in the Night (c. 1600?) by Monsù Desiderio. Yesterday’s post looked at some of the past cover designs for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. This post makes a few suggestions for how they might be presented in the future. Since these are mostly covers that I’d like to see they’re not necessarily [...]

left: Magus/Lee Adams (or Magician in the Tarot) (2009); right: I Expel All Evil (2010). Tarot imagery—or work inspired by it—continues to infiltrate the contemporary art world. The gallery sites featuring Hector de Gregorio’s pictures have a couple of other portraits based on the Major Arcana but there’s no clue as to whether he’s depicted [...]

Cover by Evgeny Lanceray for Prospectus of the Magazine, 1901. Previous posts here have concerned fin de siècle art magazines like The Savoy, Pan and Jugend; yesterday we had Sergei Diaghilev so it seems fitting to mention Diaghilev’s own magazine, Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), founded in 1899 with similar intentions to the European magazines [...]

Ida Rubinstein as Zobeide and Vaslav Nijinsky as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade (1913) by Georges Barbier. Another great exhibition at the V&A, London, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes gathers a wealth of costumes, stage designs, photographs and ephemera—including some of Stravinsky’s manuscripts—to present a history of the legendary ballet company and their visionary impresario. [...]

David Palladini’s poster for Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre has been mentioned here twice in the past week so it seemed only fair to see whether any of his other work matched that splendid piece. The artist has worked for years as a book illustrator but seems to receive most attention these days for his [...]

The Fool. I’d like this photo series by young British photographer Jak Flash even if it didn’t feature attractive men; the eye candy is icing on a thaumaturgic cake. The Major Arcana takes the Trumps of the Tarot as its inspiration and manages to reinterpret the symbolism whilst retaining the hieratic nature of the traditional [...]

Cover design by Pamela Colman Smith for The Tarot of the Bohemians by “Papus” aka Gérard Encausse (1910). The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism says it’s been around since 1999 but I don’t recall having come across it before. Among a variety of fascinating rarities is this gallery section devoted to some of the [...]

Another chance find at the Internet Archive. This small book from 1913 is an appraisal of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes written by noted actress Ellen Terry and with illustrations—which Archive.org doesn’t mention—by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist whose Tarot designs are some of the most successful ever created yet who received little credit for her work [...]

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli [...]

Following yesterday’s post about Frieda Harris’s Tarot designs, it only seems right to acknowledge the other major Tarot artist of the 20th century. Pamela Colman Smith has been overshadowed by her male mentor, Golden Dawn scholar AE Waite, even more than Frieda Harris whose name at least gets mentioned as much as Crowley’s in discussion [...]

Previous posts about illustrators. • Dream Boats and Other Stories by Dugald Stewart Walker • Joseph Southall’s Bluebeard • Ezio Anichini postcards • Julius Klinger’s Sodom • René Bull’s Rubáiyát • Rackham silhouettes • Pamela Colman Smith’s Annancy Stories • The art of Henri Caruchet • George Barbier’s Falbalas et Fanfreluches • The Time Machine [...]