by Benjamin Lomax

Created on: November 30, 2010   Last Updated: December 02, 2010

Pickman’s Model” is a short story by the creator of the Cthulhu mythos, second only to Edgar Allen Poe as the master of macabre short fiction, H.P. Lovecraft. It was written in September 1926 and originally published in Weird Tales Magazine in October of 1927 and reprinted in The Lurking Fear and other stories collection in 1971. It was also adapted for television as part of the horror series Night Gallery in 1972 and adapted for Marvel Comics Tower of Shadows #9 in 1971.

The story details the experiences of one Thurber, the narrator who expresses himself in a first person narrative, somewhat unusual for Lovecraft though it lends a chilling aspect and adds realism to the usually distant Lovecraft horror. Thurber is doing research on abstract art and searches out Richard Upton Pickman, whose horrific art is so detailed, so remarkably vivid, that he was actually ousted from art school as his paintings were disturbing to the faculty there.

Thurber’s pursuit of Pickman takes him to Boston’s squalid North End, where he tracks him to an art studio underground. The paintings there are even more horrifying than the ones that got Pickman ousted from school, each one more vivid and detailed than the last. The last enormous picture is of a great demonic canine humanoid placidly munching on a human victim. The painting has a rolled up piece of paper in front of it, which Thurber takes to be a real life example for the background of the piece. It is only upon leaving the place and unrolling the paper that he saw that it was not the background at all, but a photograph of the subject of the painting. “But by God Eliot, it was a photograph from life!”

Pickman himself is the distant descendant of a witch hanged by Cotton Mather in Salem (a repeated allegation in Lovecraft’s works among his characters) who can safely be assumed to have gained his knowledge ancestrally. Pickman makes a later appearance as a full-fledged ghoul in the later Lovecraft work Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath as an aid to Randolph Carter

Pickman’s seemingly unnatural gift for vivid description of the horrific speaks to Lovecraft’s vision of his own depictions detailed in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” though the direct attribution was toward Poe, who Lovecraft saw as the master of such details that leapt from the page and created images in the reader’s minds, something Lovecraft aspired to do as well.

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