Pickman's Model
"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 was adapted for television in 1972 as an episode of the Night Gallery anthology series.
Inspiration
Pickman's aesthetic principles of horror resemble those in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1925-27), which he was working on at the time the short story was composed.[Joshi and Schultz, p. 205.] When Thurber notes that "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," he is echoing Lovecraft the literary critic on Poe, who "understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness".[H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature".]
Thurber's description of Pickman as a "thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist" recalls Lovecraft's approach to horror in his post-Dunsanian phase.[Joshi and Schultz, p. 205.]
The story compares Pickman's work to that of a number of actual artists, including John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Sidney Sime (1867-1941), Anthony Angarola (1893-1929), Francisco Goya (1746-1828), and Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).
Plot summary
The story revolves around a Bostonian painter named Richard Upton Pickman who creates horrifying images. His works are brilliantly executed, but so graphic that they result in his being kicked out of the college he is attending and shunned by his fellow artists.
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 run-down backwater slum of the city. 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 unworldly, 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 the paper to reveal that it is photograph not of the background of the painting, but of the subject. Pickman drew his inspirations not from a diseased imagination, but from real life.
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 actuality, old Salem names.[Joshi and Cannon, p. 219.]) 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-Quests 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.[Robert M. Price, "Randolph Carter, Warlord of Mars", Black Forbidden Things, pp. 66-67.]
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".[Joshi and Schultz, p. 205.]
Thurber is one of several Lovecraft characters to develop a phobia as a result of his horrific experiences;[Joshi and Cannon, p. 219.] his fear of subways and other underground spaces resembles that of the narrator of "The Lurking Fear", who "cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering".
Setting
Like the Brooklyn neighborhood portrayed in Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook", Boston's North End is depicted as a rundown section inhabited by immigrants and honeycombed by subterranean passageways. Pickman declares:
 What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them.
Prince Street, like Henchman Street, Charter Street, and Greenough Lane, are actual North End streets. Though the story is vague about the precise location of Pickman's studio, it was apparently inspired by an actual North End building. Lovecraft wrote that when he visited the neighborhood with Donald Wandrei, he found "the actual alley & house of the tale utterly demolished, a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down."[H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Lillian D. Clark, July 17, 1927; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 205. See also H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. IV pp. 385-386, cited in Joshi and Cannon, p. 218.]
Critical reaction
Fritz Leiber, in his essay "A Literary Copernicus", praised the story for the "supreme chill" of its final line.[Lovecraft Remembered, p. 461; cited in Joshi and Cannon, p. 239.] 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".[Joshi and Cannon, p. 8.] An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia dismisses the story as "relatively conventional".[Joshi and Schultz, p. 205.]
Media adaptation
In 1971, writer Roy Thomas and artist Tom Palmer adapted "Pickman's Model" for the Marvel Comics horror anthology Tower of Shadows (#9 Jan. 1971), reprinted in Marvel's Masters of Terror (#2 Sept. 1975)
In 1972, the television show Night Gallery adapted "Pickman's Model" as a segment. In the TV version, the character of the narrator in the short story becomes a woman (Louise Sorel) who has fallen in love with Pickman (Bradford Dillman).
In 1981, Austinite Cathy Welch created a short, thirty minute version of the story. The basic story was preserved, with the tale of Thurber's night at Pickman's being relayed by him to his skeptical girlfriend.
The Chilean horror movie "Chilean Gothic" (2000) is loosely based on "Pickman's Model", where a private detective searches for Pickman in the Island of Chiloe in the south of Chile, whose mythology is full of monsters and grotesque creatures.
Connections
One of the sponsors of the expedition in At the Mountains of Madness (1936) is the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation.
The motif of a character emptying all six bullets from a revolver also appears in "Herbert West--Reanimator" and "The Thing on the Doorstep".[Joshi and Cannon, p. 237.]
Mrs. Pickman is the name of the Hobbs End hotel proprietor in John Carpenter's Lovecraftian tribute film In the Mouth of Madness.
The title of Joanna Russ' short story "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket...But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!”, reprinted in the anthology Cthulhu 2000, is a quotation from "Pickman's Model".
"Pickman's Modem" is a very short tale of an evil computer that plays on the original title more than the plot, also appearing in Cthulhu 2000.
Many of the short stories and novels by Caitlín R. Kiernan are directly connected to "Pickman's Model," including her novels Low Red Moon and Daughter of Hounds. Her short story, "Pickman's Other Model," is a sequel, following Eliot's investigation into Thurber's suicide.
In Alan Moore's The Courtyard the Aklo dealer offers the protagonist some of a collection of pictures comprising Pickman's Necroticia and has a print of his work at his house.
The Rockstar Game Manhunt 2, part of the plot includes a series of scientific experiments called "The Pickman Project," headed by a Doctor Pickman.[Alex Simmons "IGN: Manhunt 2 Preview", IGN UK April 27, 2007. Accessed October 30, 2007]
The titular character of the ongoing comic "Killing Pickman" takes his name from Richard Pickman.
The Vertigo Comics graphic novel, Lovecraft, by Hans Rodionoff and Keith Giffen features Pickman as a primary antagonist who lives in an alternate reality known as "Arkham".
In Stephen King's novel It, during the flashback sequence about the 1920s bar fight in Derry, Maine, the narrator tells Michael Hanlon that a strange painter named Pickman was present at the bar that night.
Pickman appears in the game Laplace's Demon as a ghoul.
There is a gargoyle on top of Notre Dame that bears a resemblance to the painting in the story. Lovecraft may have actually gotten the idea for this story from this sculpture since he references Notre Dame in the story.
References
Definitive version.
With explanatory footnotes.
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.
External links
The Sidney Sime Page
An Historical Overview of the North End
http://www.fierrofilms.com/pickmansmodel Pickman's Model (2008)
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