"Pickman's Model" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales.

It has been adapted for television anthology series twice: in a 1971 episode of Night Gallery, starring Bradford Dillman, and in a 2022 episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, starring Crispin Glover and Ben Barnes.

Plot

thumb|Illustration by Lovecraft, 1934

The story revolves around a Bostonian painter named Richard Upton Pickman, who creates horrifying images. His works are brilliantly executed, yet are so graphic that they result in the revocation of his membership in the Boston Art Club and his ostracism from the city's artistic community. The narrator is a friend of Pickman, who, after the artist's mysterious disappearance, relates to another acquaintance how he was taken on a tour of Pickman's personal gallery, hidden away in a rundown backwater slum. As the two delved deeper into Pickman's mind and art, the rooms seemed to grow ever more evil and the paintings ever more horrific, ending with a final enormous painting of an unearthly, red-eyed, and vaguely canine humanoid balefully chewing on a human victim.

A noise sent Pickman running outside the room with a gun, while the narrator reached out to unfold what looked like a small piece of rolled paper attached to the monstrous painting. The narrator heard some shots, and Pickman walked back in with the smoking gun, telling a story of shooting some rats, and the two men departed. Afterwards, the narrator realized that he had nervously grabbed and put the rolled paper in his pocket when the shots were fired. He unrolled it, to reveal that it was a photograph not of the background of the painting, but of the subject. Pickman drew his inspirations not from a diseased imagination, but from monsters that were very much real.

Characters

  • Richard Upton Pickman: Pickman is depicted as a renowned Boston painter notorious for his ghoulish works. His great-great-great-great-grandmother was hanged by Cotton Mather during the Salem witch trials of 1692. ("Pickman" and "Upton" are, in reality, old Salem names.) In 1926, Pickman vanished from his home—a date only given in Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon". Pickman reappears as a ghoul in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926) and aids Randolph Carter in his journeys.

:Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price writes, "Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadaths Pickman surely bears little relationship to the character of the same name we met in 'Pickman's Model', though he is ostensibly the same person." He suggests that the portrayal of Pickman in Dream-Quest is influenced by the character of Tars Tarkas in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars.

  • Thurber: The narrator, who gets to know Pickman while working on "a monograph about weird art", describes himself as "fairly 'hard-boiled'", as well as "middle-aged and decently sophisticated". He is apparently a World War I veteran: "I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out."

:Given this description, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia finds Thurber's horror at Pickman's paintings "implausible ... strained and hysterical". Thurber is one of several Lovecraft characters to develop a phobia as a result of his horrific experiences;

Inspiration

thumb|alt=A large ghoul, resembling a hoofed humanoid lion, holding a dead man in its fist|[[Hannes Bok's illustration for the printing of the story in the December 1951 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries]]

Pickman's aesthetic principles of horror resemble those in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1925–1927), on which he was working at the time the short story was composed.

Thurber's description of Pickman as a "thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist" recalls Lovecraft's approach to horror in his post-Dunsanian phase.

Critical reaction

Fritz Leiber, in his essay "A Literary Copernicus", praised the story for the "supreme chill" of its final line. Peter Cannon calls the tale "a well-nigh perfect example of Poe's unity of effect principle", though he cites as its "one weakness" the "contrived ending". An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia dismisses the story as "relatively conventional".

  • The story is adapted as an episode, directed by Keith Thomas and written by Lee Patterson, for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. Crispin Glover portrays Pickman and Ben Barnes plays Thurber. The plot is greatly expanded, using the events of the story as a jumping-off point for a broad Lovecraftian pastiche, including witches, cultists, and an implied apocalypse at the hands of a Great Old One, possibly Shub-Niggurath or Yog-Sothoth. Thurber and Pickman are depicted as old classmates at Miskatonic University, Thurber's family life is fleshed out with a wife and son, Pickman is shot by Thurber and eaten by his ghouls, and an exhibition of Pickman's paintings drives both Thurber's family and the Boston art intelligentsia to self-destructive madness.

Other media

  • R. U. Pickman is a prominent character in Lovecraftian: The Shipwright Circle by Steven Philip Jones. The Lovecraftian series reimagines the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft into one single-universe modern epic.
  • In the 1994 Lovecraftian John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness, the Sam Neill and Julie Carmen characters stay at Pickman's Inn, whose innkeeper, Mrs. Pickman, is played by Frances Bay. ("Pickman's Motel" would have been nearly identical to the title of the Lovecraft story, but a motel would not be in keeping with the nature of the town of Hobb's End, New Hampshire, where the inn is located).
  • In Stephen King's novel It, an artist named Pickman takes part in the 1929 ambush of the Bradley Gang at the Derry city square.
  • In the 2015 video game Fallout 4, there is a man named Pickman who kills raiders, collects their heads, and uses their blood to make disturbing paintings, which are displayed in a building called "Pickman's Gallery", located in the North End of the video game's post-apocalyptic Boston.

See also

  • A Short Film About John Bolton, a 2003 film by Neil Gaiman with a similar concept
  • "The Horror in the Museum", a short story by Lovecraft with similar elements
  • Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, a horror anthology series that adapts the story into an episode

References

Sources

  • Definitive version.
  • With explanatory footnotes.
  • Sederholm, Carl, "What Screams are Made Of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model"", Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 16, No. 4 (64) (Winter 2006), pp. 335–349.
  • Full text at the H. P. Lovecraft archive