as a "thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist" recalls Lovecraft's approach to horror in his post-Dunsanian phase. The story compares Pickman's work to that of a number of actual artists, including Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), Gustave Doré (1832–1883), Sidney Sime (1867–1941), Anthony Angarola (1893–1929), Francisco Goya (1746–1828), and Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961). Technique The technique of the story is unusual for Lovecraft. The first-person narrative takes the form of a monologue directed at the reader in effect as a fictive listener, whose presumed interjections are implied via the narrator's responses to them. Tangential comments reveal that the conversation takes place in the narrator's Boston drawing room in the evening, where the two have just arrived via taxi. Pickman's narrative-within-the-narrative is also a monologue, directed in turn at the outer narrator as listener. Both narratives are colloquial, casual, and emotionally expressive, which is atypical of Lovecraft's protagonists and style. Connections The motif of a character emptying all six bullets from a revolver also appears in the Lovecraft stories "Herbert West–Reanimator" and "The Thing on the Doorstep". Critical reaction Fritz Leiber, in his essay "A Literary Copernicus", praised the story for the "supreme chill" of its final line. Peter Cannon calls the tale "a well-nigh perfect example of Poe's unity of effect principle", though he cites as its "one weakness" the "contrived ending". An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia dismisses the story as "relatively conventional". Adaptations In 1971, writer Roy Thomas and artist Tom Palmer adapted "Pickman's Model" for the Marvel Comics horror anthology Tower of Shadows (#9, Jan. 1971), reprinted in Marvel's Masters of Terror (#2, Sept. 1975). In 1972, the television show Night Gallery adapted "Pickman's Model" as a segment. In the TV version, the character of the narrator in the short story becomes a woman (Louise Sorel) who has fallen in love with Pickman (Bradford Dillman). In Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Season 2, Episode 4) the short segment "Harvey" shows a possible future in which the character Harvey has a roommate who can see otherworldly creatures through a portal in his closet, the visages of which he replicates through paintings and sells for a tidy profit. Unfortunately, the interactions with the creatures come at a great price to his sanity, leading him to commit suicide by hanging. The story is adapted as an episode, directed by Keith Thomas and written by Lee Patterson, for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. Crispin