At the end of January 2024 on John Coulthart’s blog, he showed an early surrealist drawing “Exquisite Corpse (1927) by Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise”. The result of three-person collaborative ‘art game’, derived from a children’s game. He doesn’t mention this, but it struck me how similar this is to how later artists have depicted the basic idea of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’ in “The Shadow Out Of Time”. Including the scale with humans.

The “Exhibition History” (the University of Chicago currently holds the original) only reveals a 1984 showing, but one wonders if Lovecraft might have seen it before “Shadow” (1934-35).

For comparison, however, here is Lovecraft’s own at-the-time drawing of the Great Race…

Not so similar, though admittedly the viewing angle is different. So perhaps it is some later artists who have chosen to accentuate the apparent borrowing from a surrealist experiment?