In “Pickman’s Model,” a painter, of Salem ancestry, whose paintings of outré subjects are assumed to be the fruits of a keen imagination, but are ultimately found to be from real life and from firsthand knowledge of forbidden subjects. He is compared to Gustave Doré, Sidney Sime, and Anthony Angarola. He disappears mysteriously, after emptying his pistol at an unseen monster lurking in the basement of his studio in the North End of Boston during a visit by the narrator of the story. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,Pickman becomes a ghoul, like the subject of many of his paintings in “Pickman’s Model.”
HPL describes Pickman not as a fantaisiste, but as a realist—a term HPL came to feel best described himself following his shift toward cosmic fictional themes around 1926.
“Pickman’s Model.”
Short story (5,570 words); probably written in early September 1926. First published in WT(October 1927); rpt. WT(November 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2 and TD.
The narrator, Thurber, tells why he ceased association with the painter Richard Upton Pickman of Boston, who has recently disappeared. He had maintained relations with Pickman long after his other acquaintances had dropped him because of the grotesqueness of his paintings, and so on one occasion he was taken to Pickman’s secret cellar studio in the decaying North End of Boston, near the ancient Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Here were some of Pickman’s most spectacularly demonic paintings; one in particular depicts a “colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes” nibbling at a man’s head as a child chews a stick of candy. When a strange noise is heard, Pickman maintains it must be rats clambering through the underground tunnels honeycombing the area. Pickman, in another room, fires all six chambers of his revolver—a rather odd way to kill rats. After leaving, Thurber finds that he had inadvertently taken a photograph affixed to the canvas; thinking it a mere shot of scenic background, he is horrified to find
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that it is a picture of the monster itself— “it was a photograph from life.”
HPL portrayed the North End setting quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, he was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. HPL’s comment at the time (when he took Donald Wandrei to the scene) is of interest: “the actual alley & house of the tale [had been] utterly demolished; a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, [July 17, 1927]; ms., JHL). This suggests that HPL had an actual house in mind for Pickman’s North End studio. The tunnels mentioned in the story are also reaclass="underline" they probably date from the colonial period and may have been used for smuggling.
The story is noteworthy in that it expresses many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that HPL had just outlined in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Thurber notes: “…only the real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.” This statement is HPL’s ideal of weird literature as well. And when Thurber confesses that “Pickman was in every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist” one thinks of HPL’s allusion to his recent abandonment of the Dunsanian prose-poetic technique for the “prose realism” ( SL3.96) that would be the hallmark of his later work. The colloquial style of the story (as with “In the Vault”) is unconvincing; Thurber, although supposedly a “tough” guy who had been through the world war, expresses implausible horror and shock at Pickman’s paintings: his reactions seem strained and hysterical. Pickman recurs as a minor character in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. “Pickman’s Model,” perhaps because it is relatively conventional, has proved popular with readers. It was anthologized in HPL’s lifetime, in Christine Campbell Thomson’s By Daylight Only(1929) and again in Thomson’s Not at Night Omnibus(1937).
See Will Murray, “In Pickman’s Footsteps,” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 27–32; James Anderson, “‘Pickman’s Model’: Lovecraft’s Model of Terror,” LSNos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 15–21; K.Setiya, “Aesthetics and the Artist in ‘Pickman’s Model’” (one of “Two Notes on Lovecraft”), LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 15–16.
“Picture, The.”
Nonextant juvenile story; written in 1907. Described in HPL’s commonplace book as concerning a “painting of ultimate horror.” In a letter to Robert Bloch (June 1, 1933) he says of it: “I had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic struggle—but in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains …& on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the sort of claw which evidently killed the artist” ( Letters to Robert Bloch[Necronomicon Press, 1993], p. 15). The story was possibly influenced by Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” in which a painter, in painting a portrait of his wife, insidiously sucks the life from the woman and transfers it into the portrait.
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“Picture in the House, The.”
Short story (3,350 words); written on December 12, 1920. First published in the National Amateur (“July 1919” [not released until summer 1921]); rpt. WT(January 1924) and WT(March 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2and CC
The narrator, “in quest of certain genealogical data,” is traveling by bicycle throughout New England. One day a heavy downpour forces him to take shelter at a decrepit farmhouse in the “Miskatonic Valley.” When his knocks fail to summon an occupant, he believes the house to be uninhabited and enters; but shortly the occupant, who had been asleep upstairs, makes an appearance. The man seems very old, but also quite ruddy of face and muscular of build. His clothes are slovenly, and he seems to have just awoken from a nap. The old man, seemingly a harmless backwoods farmer speaking in “an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct” (“‘Ketched in the rain, be ye?’”), notes that his visitor had been examining a very old book on a bookcase, Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo,“printed in Frankfort in 1598.” This book continually turns, as if from frequent consultation, to plate XII, depicting “in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques.” The old man avers that he obtained the book from a sailor from Salem years ago, and as he babbles in his increasingly loathsome patois he begins to make vile confessions of the effects of that plate: “‘Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin ’ gits a holt on ye—As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—.’” At that point a drop of liquid falls from the ceiling directly upon the plate. The narrator thinks at first it is rain but then observes that it is a drop of blood. A thunderbolt conveniently destroys the house and its tenant, but the narrator somehow survives.