The Prophetic Pictures

The Prophetic Pictures is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in The Token annual gift book in 1837 and later collected in his Twice Told Tales collection. The story is one of his more directly supernatural shorter pieces, with the central premise involving a portrait painter whose paintings have the unusual ability to reveal the future character development of the people he paints.

The story follows a young couple named Walter Ludlow and Elinor who have commissioned the painter to produce their wedding portraits. The painter, working from his careful observation of the two young people, produces portraits that capture not just their current appearance but the particular qualities of personality and the eventual fates that he has perceived in them. The wider plot develops as Walter and Elinor’s actual lives begin to unfold in ways that confirm the painter’s prophetic vision.

Hawthorne uses the supernatural premise to develop the kind of moral and psychological material that his best shorter fiction reliably worked with. The painter’s particular gift, the question of whether his paintings actually reveal future character or whether the central characters are influenced by what they have seen in the portraits, and the wider question of how artistic perception relates to moral truth all run through the story alongside the central narrative plot.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The Prophetic Pictures shows him working with the supernatural and visual artistic themes that his major fiction also touched on. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is essential.