Pickman's model

Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft is a spoken account addressed to a friend named Eliot: "You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot." The speaker says he can no longer use the subway or go down into cellars. He says he stopped seeing the painter Richard Upton Pickman, though morbid art does not shock him, and he calls Pickman the greatest painter Boston ever had. He names the canvas Ghoul Feeding, the picture that made Minot cut Pickman.

As the speaker describes Pickman's paintings, the figures are roughly bipedal, with a forward slump, a vaguely canine cast and a rubbery texture. They are shown in cemeteries and underground passages, leaping through open windows at night, and baying in a ring around a witch on Gallows Hill. The speaker also mentions an old place in the North End that Pickman hired under the name of Peters, and something he found in his coat the next morning. The text notes that it was produced from Weird Tales, October 1927.