Pickman's Model (Lovecraft)
Short Summary
Boston, presumably 1920s. A man named Thurber explained to his friend Eliot why he suddenly stopped associating with the artist Richard Upton Pickman.
Pickman was a brilliant but controversial painter who created disturbing images of monsters and ghouls. He took Thurber to his secret studio in Boston's North End, where he showed him increasingly horrifying paintings of monsters in modern settings.
In the cellar studio, Thurber saw Pickman's most terrifying work yet - a monster feeding on a human victim. While examining the painting, Thurber noticed a photograph pinned to the canvas. Before he could properly look at it, strange sounds from the cellar prompted Pickman to investigate, firing his gun at what he claimed were rats.
Well - that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using
Detailed Summary
Division of the summary into chapters is conditional.
The Narrator's Association with Pickman
While riding in a taxi with Eliot, the narrator defended his aversion to the subway system and explained why he had stopped visiting the Art Club and Richard Upton Pickman. He revealed that Pickman had disappeared, and the police remained unaware of his secret studio in Boston's North End.
The narrator explained that he hadn't abandoned Pickman for the same reasons as others, like Dr. Reid. He considered Pickman the greatest painter Boston ever had, even after seeing his controversial work 'Ghoul Feeding.' Unlike others who created conventional horror art, Pickman possessed an extraordinary ability to capture true terror.
That's because only a 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
The Visit to Pickman's Secret Studio
The narrator frequently visited Pickman while researching for a monograph on weird art. One evening, Pickman offered to show him something unusual at his secret studio in the North End. He spoke passionately about the area's historical significance and its connection to witchcraft and underground tunnels. They walked through old streets until they reached an antique house where Pickman had his hidden workspace.
The place for an artist to live is the North End... Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to live and feel and die.
Inside, Pickman showed his guest paintings that were too disturbing for public display. The artworks depicted grotesque scenes of monsters and ghouls in various settings, from graveyards to modern subway stations. The creatures appeared partially human but with canine features, often shown feeding or attacking their prey.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground - for Pickman's morbid art was pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity
The Horror in the Cellar
Pickman then led the narrator to his cellar studio, where they passed a large brick well. The unfinished paintings there were even more horrifying than those upstairs. The artist explained that he used photographs for backgrounds to achieve precise details in his work. When Pickman unveiled his latest canvas, the narrator was overwhelmed with terror.
Pickman was in every sense - in conception and in execution - a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist... whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was plain.
The painting showed a monstrous creature with red eyes devouring a human victim. The narrator noticed a photograph pinned to the canvas, presumably for reference. Before he could examine it, Pickman suddenly became alert to strange sounds in the cellar. He left the room with his revolver, and the narrator heard scuffling noises, followed by several gunshots.
It was the technique, Eliot - the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique! As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas.
The Terrible Truth
When Pickman returned, he dismissed the disturbance as rats in the old well. He led the narrator out through different alleys, and they parted ways. The narrator never spoke to Pickman again. The reason for his sudden break with the artist wasn't the paintings themselves, but rather what he discovered in his coat pocket the next morning - the curled-up photograph from the canvas.
The photograph revealed that the monster in Pickman's painting wasn't imagined - it was real. The background wasn't a reference photo but rather showed the actual creature in Pickman's cellar. This discovery explained the artist's uncanny ability to create such lifelike horrors and suggested that the sounds they heard weren't rats at all.
Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone - back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt.
The narrator concluded by explaining that Pickman had either been born inhuman or had found a way to access forbidden realms. The artist had disappeared into the darkness he so often depicted, leaving behind only his terrifying legacy and the truth about his models. The narrator burned the photograph, unwilling to keep evidence of what lurked in Pickman's cellar, and developed a lasting fear of subways and cellars.
The story ended with the revelation that Pickman's artistic genius came not from imagination but from having access to real monsters, suggesting that beneath the streets of Boston, particularly in the old North End, there existed a hidden world of horrors that Pickman had discovered and documented through his art. His disappearance implied that he had either joined these creatures or been taken by them, leaving behind only his paintings as evidence of their existence.
The narrator's final refusal to explain exactly what he saw in the photograph, combined with his newfound aversion to underground spaces, served as testament to the horrifying reality he had glimpsed - a reality that proved Pickman's paintings weren't products of a disturbed imagination but rather faithful portraits of an unseen world existing alongside human civilization.