Richard Upton Pickman

Richard Upton Pickman is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft for his short story "Pickman's Model". He was a renowned Boston painter notorious for his graphic works.

Biography[]

Lovecraft's Work[]

Pickman's origins are ambiguous. His artwork depicts the ghouls as having the habit of abducting human children and replacing them with "changelings": ghoul children that look deceptively human-like, left to be raised by humans. One of the children depicted bears an uncanny resemblance to Pickman himself, hinting that he might have been one of those changelings. If true, this could explain his close association with ghouls (HPL: "Pickman's Model"), and the fact that he apparently transformed into a ghoul himself at some point after his disappearance (HPL: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).

As an artist, Pickman had undeniable skill. "Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman," his one-time friend and devotee Thurber declared. His "morbid art was preëminently one of daemoniac portraiture," with "frightful pictures which turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell"--though he went on to do a series of "modern studies" that "brought the horror right into our own daily life." He was "a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist," Thurber maintained, whose art "coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly." (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

Pickman came from "old Salem stock," and had a great-great-great-great-grandmother hanged during the Witch Trials in 1692. He had a studio on Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, and another one in the North End that he rented under the name Peters. There he painted in the cellar, where he said he could "catch the night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn’t even think of in Newbury Street." (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

"It’s my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won’t find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets," he claimed. It was his contention that "one must paint terror as well as beauty from life." (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

Pickman's art grew increasingly shocking, to the point where several people in his social circle refused to associate with him. Dr. Reid, an acquaintance who studied comparative pathology, insisted that the artist "repelled him more and more every day...that the fellow’s features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn’t like"; he told Pickman he was "a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution." It got to the point where the Boston Art Club, where he was a member, refused to exhibit his painting "Ghoul Feeding,” and the Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't take it as a gift. (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

Pickman was a friend of Randolph Carter, and once introduced him to a ghoul. (HPL: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

Pickman disappeared early in 1926, reportedly taking with him the unique sixteenth-century Greek text of the Necronomicon that his family was rumoured to own. (HPL: "History of the Necronomicon") Thurber later claimed that the grotesque beasts living amongst and preying upon humans depicted in his work were painted from photographs taken by Pickman himself, and not merely the result of a fertile imagination. (HPL: "Pickman's Model")

Pickman was later met in the Dreamlands by Randolph Carter, fully transformed into a ghoul. Pickman and his ghoul pack proved themselves valuable and dependable allies to Carter during his quest. (HPL: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

Expanded Mythos[]

"They Thrive in Darkness" (2006): In Ron Shiflet's short story, Pickman runs with his former models in the modern day, and appears to be treated as something of a king by them.
"Pickman's Other Model (1929)" (2008): In Caitlin R. Kiernan's story, an artist becomes obsessed with a series of nude studies Pickman did of the silent movie actress Vera Endacott. In "The Peddler's Tale, or Isabel's Revenge," Kiernan depicts Pickman as a ghoul helping the deposed Dreamlands queen Isobel Snow.
Casefile: Arkham- Nightmare on the Canvas (2016): Josh Finney and Patrick McEvoy graphic novel set in 1946 which tells of how Pickman became the serial killer dubbed the Arkham Slasher. Still keeping the company of ghouls, he is eventually tracked down and killed by private detective Hank Flynn.

Known Paintings[]

"Ghoul Feeding": His "tremendous achievement" rejected by both the Boston Art Club and the Museum of Fine Arts
"The Lesson": Ghouls teaching an apparently human child how to feed like themselves.
"Subway Accident": Ghouls attacking a crowd in the Boylston Street subway station.
"Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn": Ghouls in a vault reading and laughing at a Boston guide book.
A Puritan father reading scripture to his family, one of whom is clearly a ghoul changeling.
A ring of ghouls "baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill."
A cross section of Beacon Hill with ghouls living in underground burrows.
A "dance on Copp’s Hill among the tombs" set in the present day.

Trivia[]

The title of the painting "Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn" likely refers to physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and poets James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all interred at Mount Auburn's cemetery.
"Pickman" and "Upton" are, in actuality, old Salem names. (EXP: Lovecraft Remembered)