Pickman's Model

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Richard Upton Pickman is depicted as a renowned Boston painter with a lineage tied to the Salem witch trials; his great-great-great-great-grandmother was hanged by Cotton Mather in 1692. The names 'Pickman' and 'Upton' are actual old Salem names. In 1926, Pickman vanished from his home, a date corroborated by Lovecraft's History of the Necronomicon. While he reappears as a ghoul in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), aiding Randolph Carter, scholar Robert M. Price notes that this portrayal bears little relationship to the character in 'Pickman's Model,' suggesting the Dream-Quest version may be influenced by Tars Tarkas from A Princess of Mars. The story establishes that ghouls are real entities that exist alongside humans, capable of blending into society until their true nature is revealed through art or action.

In Their Own Story

The narrator, a 'fairly hard-boiled' and middle-aged World War I veteran named Thurber, describes his friendship with Pickman while working on a monograph about weird art. He recounts visiting Pickman's studio in the North End of Boston, a section inhabited by immigrants and honeycombed with subterranean passageways. Prince Street, Henchman Street, Charter Street, and Greenough Lane are actual streets mentioned as part of this network. Inside the studio, Thurber witnessed paintings so graphic they seemed to grow more evil the deeper they went into the room. The climax occurred before a final enormous painting of an unearthly, red-eyed humanoid chewing on a victim. A noise sent Pickman running outside with a gun; shots were fired, and he returned claiming to have shot rats. Thurber realized he had nervously pocketed a rolled piece of paper attached to the canvas. Upon unrolling it later, he found it was not a background sketch but a photograph of the actual monster, confirming that Pickman's inspiration came from real creatures.

Reader's Guide

The narrative structure is unusual for Lovecraft, utilizing a first-person monologue directed at a fictive listener named Eliot. Thurber implies Eliot's questions and interjections through his own dialogue, creating a casual, colloquial tone distinct from Lovecraft's typical style. The story takes place in the narrator's Boston drawing room in the evening after arriving by taxi. Key thematic elements include the 'physiology of fear' and how only a real artist understands the anatomy of terror, echoing Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1925–1927). Thurber describes Pickman as a 'thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.' The story compares Pickman's work to that of Henry Fuseli, Gustave Doré, Sidney Sime, Anthony Angarola, Francisco Goya, and Clark Ashton Smith. A specific motif involves emptying all six bullets from a revolver, which also appears in Herbert West–Reanimator and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Did You Know?

• The story was written in September 1926 and published exactly one year later in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales.
• Pickman's great-great-great-great-grandmother was hanged by Cotton Mather during the Salem witch trials of 1692.
• The narrator, Thurber, is a World War I veteran who describes himself as 'fairly hard-boiled' and mentions seeing action in France.
• Lovecraft wrote that when he visited the North End with Donald Wandrei, they found the actual alley and house of the tale had been utterly demolished.
• In the 2022 adaptation by Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, Thurber is played by Ben Barnes and Pickman by Crispin Glover.