Lovecraft by Donald R. Burleson;

Author:Donald R. Burleson; [Burleson, Donald R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813182612
Publisher: UP of Kentucky
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. “Pickman’s Model”

The year 1926 saw the writing of H.P. Lovecraft’s “portrait of the artist,” not in the Joycean sense necessarily. This fictional portrayal of a painter of weird canvases is called “Pickman’s Model” (DUN, 12-25). The narrator, whom we know only as Thurber, relates the tale as if speaking to an art club acquaintance whom he addresses as Eliot. Evidently Eliot has asked the narrator why it is that the artist Richard Upton Pickman, a person of odd repute at the art club, has recently vanished. The narrator regales Eliot with remarks about Pickman’s exceedingly weird and morbid art, canvases (exemplified by one called “Ghoul Feeding”) that have shocked and alienated other members of the club. Thurber tells Eliot that he has visited Pickman and heard that outré artist’s wild theories of horrific art and its inspirational sources.

Pickman, in a flashback subnarration, explains to Thurber that in a regular Back Bay Boston environment there are “things that are out of place here, and that can’t be conceived here, anyhow” (15). Pickman reveals that he has rented, under an assumed name, a studio in the crumbling and archaic alleys of Boston’s North End, where he takes the curious Thurber and shows him hideous but brilliant paintings “quite beyond the power of words to classify” (18). The dominant subjects of the paintings seem to be ghoulish creatures with “a vaguely canine cast” and a facial texture of “rubberiness.” Yet the backgrounds are not phantasmal or extramundane dreamworlds; rather, they are commonplace local scenes, including the nearby Copp’s Hill Burying Ground.

Pickman, in his hidden studio, paints in the cellar, “where the inspiration is thickest” (17), with artificial light. There is in one room in this cellar a large circular well plugged by a heavy wooden disk. Pickman, having taken the visiting narrator to an adjoining room (the studio), seems to hear something that disturbs him and goes to investigate. Thurber hears shots, and Pickman returns, explaining that the problem is rats. Yet the suggestion grows that this explanation is specious. Thurber has noticed a curled-up piece of paper tacked to a canvas-in-progress and has assumed that it is a photograph of a mundane background that Pickman intends to paint behind the revolting figure on the easel. In the excitement of hearing the shots, Thurber, fingering the piece of paper and intending to ask the artist about it, absentmindedly pockets it, and soon thereafter he leaves. Now Pickman has disappeared, and Thurber reveals to Eliot what was on the paper that had been pinned to the unfinished painting—not the photograph of an intended background, but a photograph of the ghoulish figure itself: “It was the model he was using—and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life” (25). In this rather engaging tale, this portraiture of a portraiture, we shall of course find that the surface pigments are not all that the canvas holds.

At the outset one notes

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