Abrac
Waite had already decided to make a deck with illustrated minors,
Jason, out of curiosity, what's your source for this?
Waite had already decided to make a deck with illustrated minors,
Waite had been thinking about creating a "rectified" tarot deck for five or six years prior to actually doing so.
His stated reasons for illustrating his own minors also follows from experiences he would have had much earlier. The use of the illustration of cards as a focus for meditation, as a "door" to additional knowledge, would have been something he was first taught in the Golden Dawn years before.
Wait's decision to go through with the project was made fairly quickly in late 1908/early 1909. He felt pressure from Crowley's threat to publish all of the secrets of the Golden Dawn to act quickly and get his tarot out first.
Yes, of course Waite was aware of earlier decks that had fully illustrated pips. He was actually quite disdainful of them.
"There in was a period, however, when the numbered cards were also pictures, but such devices were sporadic inventions of particular artists and were either conventional designs of the typical or allegorical kind, distinct from what is understood by symbolism, or they were illustrations—shall we say?—of manners, customs and periods. They were, in a word, adornments, and as such they did nothing to raise the significance of the Lesser Arcana to the plane of the Trumps Major; moreover, such variations are exceedingly few." Waite - The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
(snip...)