“The Pickman Model”: HP Lovecraft; story and analysis

Pickman’s model is a synthesis of the aesthetic theory about horror proposed by HP Lovecraft in his essay: Supernatural horror in literature (Supernatural Horror in Literature).

In fact, the narrator of the story, Thurber, seems to defend that hypothesis when he maintains that:

Only the true artist knows the real anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear.
(Only the real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear)

In a way, HP Lovecraft uses the reasoning of Thurber, protagonist of Pickman’s model, to define the aesthetics of fear in Edgar Allan Poe within the aforementioned essay. There he states that:

(Poe) perfectly understood the mechanics and physiology of fear.
(Understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear)

Pickman’s model places this artist of the macabre as the last link in a long line of painters and illustrators to whom HP Lovecraft I deeply admired. All of them are mentioned in the story: John Henry Fuseli, Gustave Doré, Sidney Sime, Anthony Angarola, Francisco Goya and Clark Ashton Smith, a personal friend of the author and member of the so-called Lovecraft Circle.

Pickman’s model tells the story of the Boston painter Richard Upton Pickman, capable of creating the most disturbing images. The narrator of the story is a personal friend of pickman, named Thurber, who is dedicated to investigating the mysterious disappearance of the artist in his gallery. There he discovers that the brilliant executions of pickman They do not come from an exalted imagination but from direct contact with indefinable creatures, partly canine or wolfish, who participate in an unnameable cult.

These creatures have managed to Pickman’s model be considered a story about werewolves, when in reality it only admits the secondary participation of more or less canine forms. These beings are much closer to the concept of a ghoul than a werewolf.

By the way, a creature similar to ghouls from Pickman’s model can be found in HP Lovecraft’s poem: The Howler. At the same time, there is a kind of sequel to this classic by the master of Providence, or at least a tribute, written by Robert Barbour Johnson, entitled: Far Below, which takes up the theme of Pickman’s ghouls invading a station from the underground.

In fact, the name pickman reappears in the story The dream search of the unknown Kadath (The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath), already in the form of a hateful ghoul, although in this case he may have been influenced by the character Tars Tarkas from the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs: A princess from Mars (A Princess of Mars).

The technique used in Pickman’s model is notably unusual in HP Lovecraft. The first-person narration is assimilated to a kind of monologue where the reader is, in reality, a fictional listener. The narrator’s language, as colloquial as it is emotionally expressive, also does not fit the most common protagonists in the work of HP Lovecraft.

Thurber, in other aspects, is close to other typical characters of HP Lovecraft, especially those who develop some type of phobia when surviving situations linked to the supernatural. For example, the narrator of The Lurking Fear, who suffers panic attacks every time he has to take the subway. It is interesting to mention that there are some obvious parallels between this Lovecraft classic and Clark Ashton Smith’s The Hunters from Beyond.

The Pickman Model also repeats a very common dramatic outcome in HP Lovecraft: the hero who fires six bullets to kill his enemy, a situation that occurs in Herbert West: The Reanimator (Herbert West–Reanimator) and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Pickman’s model.
Pickman’s Model, HP Lovecraft (1890-1937)

It is not necessary to say that I have gone mad, Eliot: there are many people who have more extravagant prejudices than this. Why don’t you make fun of Oliver’s grandfather, for example, who has never been in a motor vehicle? If I can’t stand that damned metropolitan railway, that’s on me; and, on the other hand, we have arrived much faster than if we had come by taxi. If we had chosen the subway, we would have had to walk up the hill to Park Street.

I confess that I am more nervous than last year, when you saw me, but I don’t think that is a sufficient reason for you to recommend the asylum to me. The Lord knows well that I have ample reason to be moved, and I think I am very fortunate to have remained lucid until now. Why the third degree? You weren’t so cruel before.

Well, if you have to listen to it, I see no reason why you shouldn’t. Perhaps you even have a right to know, since you were the only one to write to me, as if you were an aggrieved relative, when you found out that I was no longer frequenting the Art Club and that I was keeping my distance from Pickman. Now that Pickman is gone, from time to time I go around the club, but my nerves are certainly not what they used to be.

No, I don’t know what happened to Pickman and I don’t like to give in to conjecture either. You might have suspected that I knew something important when I distanced myself from him… and this is why I refuse to think where he went. Let the police investigate as much as they can. I don’t think it’s much, considering he still doesn’t know anything about the house he, under the name Peters, rented in the North End. I’m also not sure that I myself will be able to find her again… or even think about going to find her, even in broad daylight. Yes, I think I know why he rented it. I can talk to you about this. That way you’ll know, long before it’s over, why I’m not going to the police. They would force me to take them to her, but the truth is that I couldn’t return to that house even if I knew the way. Well, that’s why I can’t take the subway, or go down to any basement or warehouse, and this will also make you laugh.

It seemed to me that you could understand that my estrangement from Pickman was not due to the same stupid reasons that produced the same reaction in men like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth. Art that deals with the morbid does not interest me at all, but when someone has the genius that Pickman had, it is an honor for me to know him, regardless of the channels his work takes. Boston has never had a painter as notable as Richard Upton Pickman. I said it from the beginning and I continue to say it; I also supported him when he unveiled that “Vampire feeding.” As you may remember, Minot stopped greeting him because of that play.

To generate works like Pickman’s, a profound mastery of his art and a no less profound perception of the bowels of nature are necessary. Any cover illustrator is in a position to absurdly pour color onto paper and announce that he is giving us a nightmare, a witches’ coven or a portrait of the devil. But only a great artist can achieve a result that impresses us as credible and that terrifies us. This is possible because only a true artist can recognize the true anatomy of the terrible and the physiology of fear: he is the only one who knows the exact type of lines that awaken the dormant instincts or the inherited memories of fear, he is the only one capable of tracing the precise color contrasts and light effects that stimulate the viewer’s latent sense of the abnormal. I don’t need to explain to you why a Fuseli gives us chills, while the cover of a ghost magazine only makes us laugh. There is something that these exceptional beings grasp, something that is beyond life, and they are capable of transmitting it to us even if it is fleeting. It is the gift that distinguishes Gustave Doré. Sidney Sime has it too. Angarola, from Chicago, too. And Pickman possessed it in a superlative degree, as no one had it before him and as no one, may the Lord please, will have it again.

You don’t want to know what those men see. In artistic practice, there is a great difference between the works that capture these essential beings taken from nature and the industrial products that are manufactured in a studio. In short, I should say that the truly fantastic artist is endowed with a type of vision that enables him to perceive genuine motifs from a spectral world. For this reason, he achieves results that are miles away from the sugary representations of dreams, just as the works of a “vitalist” painter are distanced from the pastiches of someone who has learned to draw by correspondence. If I had ever been allowed to see what Pickman saw!… But no. Let’s go have a drink before we get involved in this matter. Oh my God! He wouldn’t be alive if he had seen what that man—if he was a man—saw.

As you may remember, Pickman’s forte was faces. I think that no one since Francisco Goya has put so much intensity into a feature or an expression. And before Goya we would have to look at the anonymous medieval artists who created the gargoyles or chimeras of Notre Dame or Mont SaintMichel. They believed in the reality of the creatures they depicted in their works… and perhaps they also saw that kind of creatures, especially if one remembers that the Middle Ages had some very curious stages. I clearly remember that you once asked Pickman where on earth he got such ideas and visions. The response was a very unpleasant laugh. That laugh was, coincidentally, the reason Reid became displeased with him. Reid had just graduated in Comparative Pathology and was a bag of great ideas about the biological or evolutionary meaning of any of the mental or physical symptoms imaginable. His aversion to Pickman was increasingly noticeable and practically ended in fear of the painter; He said that Pickman’s expression and even his features took a progressive course that he did not like: they developed in a sense that was not human. If you have corresponded with Reid, I assume you have told him that his mistake was in letting Pickman’s paintings operate directly on his nerves or his imagination. That’s what I said at that time.

You can be sure that I did not distance myself from Pickman because of any of these things. On the contrary, my admiration for the master grew, since there was no doubt that “Vampire Feeding” was a masterpiece. As you know, the Club refused to exhibit it and the Museum of Fine Arts did not even accept it as a donation, nor did anyone want to buy it, so the painting was left in Pickman’s house until he left. It is now in the hands of his father, in the family home in Salem. You well know that Pickman is a native of old Salem; one of his ancestors was burned in 1692 for witchcraft.

I became accustomed to visiting Pickman with some frequency, especially after I began to look for material for the preparation of a monograph on fantasy art. Perhaps it was his own work that suggested the idea to me. Anyway, I must confess that his work…