"Pickman's Model" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It has been adapted for television anthology series twice: in a 1971 episode of Night Gallery, starring Bradford Dillman, and in a 2022 episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, starring Crispin Glover and Ben Barnes. Plot The story revolves around a Bostonian painter named Richard Upton Pickman, who creates horrifying images. His works are brilliantly executed, yet are so graphic that they result in the revocation of his membership in the Boston Art Club and his ostracization from the city's artistic community. The narrator is a friend of Pickman, who, after the artist's mysterious disappearance, relates to another acquaintance how he was taken on a tour of Pickman's personal gallery, hidden away in a rundown backwater slum. As the two delved deeper into Pickman's mind and art, the rooms seemed to grow ever more evil and the paintings ever more horrific, ending with a final enormous painting of an unearthly, red-eyed, and vaguely canine humanoid balefully chewing on a human victim. A noise sent Pickman running outside the room with a gun, while the narrator reached out to unfold what looked like a small piece of rolled paper attached to the monstrous painting. The narrator heard some shots, and Pickman walked back in with the smoking gun, telling a story of shooting some rats, and the two men departed. Afterwards, the narrator realized that he had nervously grabbed and put the rolled paper in his pocket when the shots were fired. He unrolled it, to reveal that it was a photograph not of the background of the painting, but of the subject. Pickman drew his inspirations not from a diseased imagination, but from monsters that were very much real. Characters Richard Upton Pickman: Pickman is depicted as a renowned Boston painter notorious for his ghoulish works. His great-great-great-great-grandmother was hanged by Cotton Mather during the Salem witch trials of 1692. ("Pickman" and "Upton" are, in reality, old Salem names.) In 1926, Pickman vanished from his home—a date only given in Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon". Pickman reappears as a ghoul in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926) and aids Randolph Carter in his journeys. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price writes, "Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadaths Pickman surely bears little relationship to the character of