"Pickman's Model" is a Short Story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in September of 1926 and originally published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It introduces the ghoul to the Cthulhu Mythos. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath follows up on some of the questions and characters that appear in this story.
Boston painter Richard Upton Pickman has disappeared recently, and his former friend Thurber has a dark story to tell about him. Thurber regales Audience Surrogate Eliot about Pickman's strange artwork — portraits of monsters called ghouls, so lifelike and terrifying that no respectable gallery or museum would show them. Other artists cut ties with Pickman altogether. Only Thurber remained willing to associate with him, and the frightening artist soon offers to give Thurber a private showing of his work.
When Thurber ventures into Pickman's studio, he sees paintings more horrifying than anything Pickman had dared publicly show. When he and Pickman hear something crawling about on the other side of the door, Pickman shoots at it, blaming an infestation of rats.
Thurber had, just before this, plucked a piece of paper off an easel and pocketed it. When he looks at it later, he realizes to his horror... that it is, in fact, a photo that reveals Pickman isn't painting creatures from his imagination, but reality.
"Pickman's Model" is one of the Lovecraft's stories he made drawings for, albeit several years later. It concerns two very similar drawings of a ghoul in a graveyard at night, one dated June 21, 1934 that was sent to Robert Bloch and one dated July 27, 1934 that was sent to Franklin Lee Baldwin. The June drawing was published in Marginalia in 1944 and the July drawing was published in The Acolyte Vol.1 #4 in the summer of 1943.
"Amina" by Edward Lucas White, whose work Lovecraft began reading in 1921, informed Lovecraft's depiction of ghouls in "Pickman's Model". The setting of Boston may have come about in response to the last line in "Amina" reassuringly asserting that ghouls don't dwell outside of Persia. Influence from Vathek can also be detected in that Lovecraft's ghouls live underground as they do in the novel. Following "Pickman's Model", this entered popular culture as a recurring ghoul trait.
With "Amina" preceding it, "Pickman's Model" is at the center of a network of related ghoul stories. Based on Pickman's painting "Subway Accident", Robert Barbour Johnson wrote "Far Below". Robert Bloch, Lovecraft's protégé at the time, wrote "The Grinning Ghoul", a retreading of "Pickman's Model". And both Clark Ashton Smith and Henry S. Whitehead followed Lovecraft's example by also letting "Amina" inspire them to a story, respectively "The Nameless Offspring" and "The Chadbourne Episode".
Pickman's Model was adapted for television twice. The first occurred as a segment of season 2 of Night Gallery and the second is the 2022 episode "Pickman's Model" of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. The short story was also popular for inclusion in horror comic anthologies, starting with "Pickman's Model" in Tower of Shadows #9 in 1971. This has been followed by "Pickman's Model" in Skull Comics #4 in 1974, "Pickman's Model" in Masters of Terror #2 in 1975, and "Pickman's Model" in The Lovecraft Anthology #2 in 2012.
"Pickman's Model" provides examples of the following tropes:
- Changeling Tale: Ghouls exchange their own children for human ones. Human children are raised as ghouls and grow up to become as them. One of Pickman's paintings, "The Lesson", depicts a circle of ghouls in a churchyard surrounding a human child as they teach it to partake in corpse consumption. The ghoul children, meanwhile, grow up as humans, but always keep something off about them, though nothing so bad that every single person will pick up on it. The witches and possibly pirates that had their home in New England were, in fact, ghouls among humans. Pickman himself is also a ghoul by birth yet raised human. He is, however, becoming more and more ghoul-like as he finds kinship with ghouls while all his human connections cut ties with him for his evident otherness.
- Chekhov's Gun: Thurber reaches for a curled-up photo to stretch it open, thinking it depicts a landscape that Pickman intends to paint. Just as he holds it, Pickman urges him out of his cellar studio with haste because something is approaching. In the suddenness, Thurber accidentally pockets the photo. When much later he retrieves it from his coat, he gives it a look and sees not a landscape but a ghoul.
- Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: One of the paintings shows a group of ghouls laughing their asses off as one of their number reads from a book. The title of the painting is "Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn" — they're laughing because they know they've devoured those corpses, but humans don't.
- Gendered Insult: Both Thurber and Pickman refer to art critics who don't like Pickman's work with derisive female descriptions, the first with "fussy old women" and the latter with "those cursed old maids".
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Thurber repeatedly demands alcohol to steel his nerves as he recounts the story of his acquaintance with Pickman. For his last drink, he switches it up with coffee.
- Insult Backfire: Thurber doesn't aim to insult Pickman, but can't help but be "speechless with fright and loathing" at seeing Pickman's secret paintings. From Pickman's reaction, he believes that the man understood the situation and felt highly complimented.
- Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: The ghouls steal human children and leave ghoulish youngsters in their place. The ghoul whelps appear human enough to fool their host parents into accepting them, and the kidnapped human children are raised as — and eventually transform into — ghouls. There are hints — eventually confirmed in Lovecraft's later work The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath — that Pickman himself is the product of such a swap.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: It is perfectly possible for a reader to pick up The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath before touching "Pickman's Model". If that happens, they're going to know what the ending of "Pickman's Model" is about within five paragraphs or so.
- Mad Artist: Richard Upton Pickman is a descendant of a woman hanged as a witch in Salem, and he comments that his "four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things" of magic. Pickman locates his studio in the slums of the North End in order to draw on the "night-spirit of antique horror" left by pirates, smugglers, and witches. He produces paintings of monsters so lifelike and frightening that artists and galleries universally reject his work, and his acquaintances even complain that his face is changing in ways that aren't quite human. It is ultimately revealed that Pickman's strange behavior and realistic art stem from his use of real, actual ghouls as models for his paintings. How does he do this, you ask? As one of the passages quoted above implies, he is partly a ghoul himself.
- Must Have Caffeine: After downing one glass of alcohol after another for the duration of his recounting, Thurber ends on a black coffee and urges Eliot to take his coffee black too to sit through the conclusion as to why Thurber cut ties with Pickman.
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls are canine humanoids who dwell underground and eat corpses stolen from graves. They snatch human infants and replace them with young ghouls in a classic changeling swap, and it is hinted that the kidnapped babies grow into ghouls themselves. While dangerous, the ghouls are also sentient to the point of being literate and possessing a morbid sense of humor. Later, Dream Quest develops this still further, even presenting ghouls in a strangely sympathetic light.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Richard Pickman, who loves slums and cellars, paints nightmarish scenes, and convinces ghouls to model for his artwork.
- Real After All: The photo that Thurber takes with him depicts an actual ghoul in Pickman's studio, which proves that the artist is painting the monsters from life.
- The Reveal: Thurber absentmindedly accidentally pockets a reference photograph from Pickman's studio, and only looks at the photo later. He expects the photo to depict a landscape, but instead it depicts a monstrous living creature, revealing that ghouls are real.
- Shout-Out: "Pickman's Model" has quite a few a hefty amount of references to real-life people and events.
- Thurber compares Pickman's brand of artistry to several real-life painters: Henry Fuseli, Gustave Doré, Sidney Sime, Anthony Angarola, and Francisco de Goya.
- Another artist made mention of is Clark Ashton Smith, who also was a friend and colleague of Lovecraft with several more mutual references to the other in their works.
- Two of Pickman's paintings are described in a way that resembles a real-life painting. The first painting has one or more ghouls "squatting on the chests of sleepers", which is reminiscent of The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli. The second painting depicts "a colossal and nameless blasphemy" that holds "a thing that had been a man" as it gnaws "at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy." This reminds of Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco de Goya.
- The Salem witch trials of 1692-1693 are part of the story. Cotton Mather, who played a significant role in the scale of death brought on the trials, is mentioned several times, as are his books Magnalia and Wonders of the Invisible World. The figures of Edmund Andros and William Phipps, who failed to stop the trials, are also mentioned.
- Sinister Subway: One of Pickman's paintings is "Subway Accident" and it depicts people waiting on a subway platform being attacked by ghouls that evidently live in the subway tunnels.
- Sleep Paralysis Creature: One of Pickman's paintings depicts ghoulish creatures "leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats." Pickman's aesthetic leanings furthermore get compared to those of Henry Fuseli.
- Spooky Painting: Pickman's oeuvre consists of nothing but eerie paintings. His personal gallery includes portraits of ghouls nibbling on human corpses, attacking in the subway tunnels, and dancing around a hanged witch. Pickman's work is so disturbing that it cannot be shown publicly, and mainstream Boston artists cease associating with him. Even Thurber screams at the sight of some of the more gruesome paintings. The spookiness level reaches true Lovecraftian levels when Thurber realizes the piece of paper he pocketed without thinking is a live photograph of a ghoul — everything Pickman paints is based on reality.
- Tunnel Network: The ghouls are described as using extensive systems of tunnels, mostly unmapped and unguessed at by humanity, to move around under and between towns and to access their feeding grounds and hiding places within cellars and shuttered houses.
- Was Once a Man: On occasion, ghouls switch out their own children with human ones and the ghoul children grow up in the image of humans. They're only a little off if one knows what to pay attention to. Those ghouls that return to their species eventually come to resemble them. As for the switched-out human children, they too come to resemble ghouls. If they can become human again by rejoining human society is unexplored.
