Review: Pickman's Model - H.P. Lovecraft

It seemed like reading a story by the old gentleman himself would be the best way to cap off this week, and since a commenter on one of the earlier posts mentioned “Pickman’s Model”, I thought that might be a good choice. WEIRD TALES published this story by H.P. Lovecraft in the October 1927 issue, and it’s been reprinted many, many times since then.

The narrator of “Pickman’s Model” is a man named Thurber, who seems to be a well-to-do gentleman of Boston. He’s having drinks with a young friend of his named Eliot, and during the course of the evening, he explains why he no longer associates with the well-known artist Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman, it seems, is a hugely talented artist, but the subjects of his paintings are so grotesque and bizarre that he’s become increasingly shunned in Boston society.

The highlight of Thurber’s story is a recounting of the time Pickman took him to a rented house in a poorer section of town that he uses as a private gallery and studio. Pickman takes Thurber into the basement, and what they encounter there leads Thurber to believe that Pickman isn’t just painting his pictures from imagination. He’s actually witnessed some of the terrible things he’s captured on canvas.

That’s really all there is to “Pickman’s Model”. Like most of Lovecraft’s work, it’s all atmosphere and creepiness and vague but horrifying concepts. It’s well-written and draws the reader in. I just can’t help but wish that something actually happened in it.

I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be as big a fan of Lovecraft’s work as many are. I suspect I came to it too late. Bill Crider once told me that the best time to discover Lovecraft is the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I was close to fifty years past that.

By the way, I can certainly see how this story might have been the inspiration for Robert Barbour Johnson’s story “Far Below”, which I wrote about a few days ago, and that makes me glad I read it.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the stories I’ve read this week. Look for more reviews of Mythos-inspired fiction in the days to come. Now that I’ve started those anthologies, I’d like to read more of them.