Pickman's Model

Richard Pickman is Boston's finest painter of the macabre, and the finest precisely because his ghouls are too convincing. His friend, unsettled, is given a private viewing in Pickman's studio in the oldest part of the North End, canvases of corpse-eating things in the city's tunnels and graveyards that no imagination should be able to render so exactly.

Then he finds, pinned to one canvas for reference, a photograph. Not of a model posed in costume. A photograph, from life. Pickman has not been inventing his monsters. He has been painting what sits for him. It is one of Lovecraft's cruellest small revelations, the drop from art into fact in a single line. The Archive paints him in swing, the dapper horror of a man whose models are real.