Richard upton pickman biography books

1927 short story by H. P. Lovecraft

"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

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

Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price writes, "Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath's

Richard Upton Pickman

Biography[]

Lovecraft's Work[]

Pickman's origins are ambiguous. His artwork depicts the ghouls as having the habit of abducting human children and replacing them with "changelings": ghoul children that look deceptively human-like, left to be raised by humans. One of the children depicted bears an uncanny resemblance to Pickman himself, hinting that he might have been one of those changelings. If true, this could explain his close association with ghouls (HPL: "Pickman's Model"), and the fact that he apparently transformed into a ghoul himself at some point after his disappearance (HPL: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).

As an artist, Pickman had undeniable skill. "Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman," his one-time friend and devotee Thurber declared. His "morbid art was preëminently one of daemoniac portraiture," with "frightful pictures which turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell"--though he went on to do a series of "modern studies" that "brought the horror right into our own daily life." He was "a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist," Thurber maintained, whose art "coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly." (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

Pickman came from "old Salem stock," and had a great-great-great-great-grandmother hanged during the Witch Trials in 1692. He had a studio on Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, and another one in the North End that he rented under the name Peters. There he painted in the cellar, where he said he could "catch the night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn’t even think of in Newbury