Teheuti
Let's see: she just finished "a big job for very little cash."Fulgour said:The Pamela Colman Smith Tarot of 1909
was not a work for hire, as is insited on.
She was paid for a job.
JOB: "A regular activity performed in exchange for payment, especially as one's trade, occupation, or profession. . . . A specific piece of work to be done for a set fee."
A work-for-hire does not mean that she did get to keep the original drawings. What it usually means is that the person does not own the copyright or the rights to publication. If she was paid very little then it may have been considered that selling the original artwork would be part of her recompense.
There doesn't seem to be any indication in any of the copyright issues surrounding the RWS deck that the copyright was owned by PCS.
Pixie trained in commercial art under Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute. See Holly Voley's website at:
http://home.comcast.net/~pamela-c-smith/artworks.html
Since she only went through the first two initiations in the Outer Order of the GD, she would not yet have access to the GD teachings on the Tarot - which was only for those initiated into the Inner Order. There's no indication that she translated tarot works from the French and so her source of Tarot meanings would have been Mathers' 1888 booklet on the Tarot and the work of Waite as 'Grand Orient,' which would not seem especially conducive, by themselves, to the imagery found in this deck. Nor, does she appear to have been involved with the Masons (especially not as a Catholic who was not allowed to belong), and so where did all the Masonic imagery come from? Her biographer, Melinda Boyd Parsons, who curated a show of her art, found in her other works few, if any, instances of her adoption of "Rosicrucian religious symbols or colors" the way they can be found among other GD artists.
This is not to say that Pixie was not the artist of the deck - she clearly was, nor that she didn't add things above and beyond the materials and suggestions that Waite gave her - many of the Minors use motifs that are found in her other works.
As Yeats & Debussy both noted, she had an uncanny ability to know exactly what was in their minds when creating art illustrating their works. She used her highly evolved intuitive gift to collaborate in extraordinary ways with quite a few people. This, in itself, was an amazing ability.
Mary