My first try at colourising the scan of the Vrest Orton ‘milkmaid’ picture. It is September 1928, and HPL is again visiting Vrest Orton in the woods of Vermont, and is wearing a wooden yoke of the type traditionally used to carry milk-pails.
“The change of plan began when a friend of mine — now resident in New York but spending the summer in his ancestral Vermont — fairly kidnapped me into a two weeks’ visit at a lonely farm he had hired in the exquisite countryside near Brattleboro. In this half-fabulous paradise of endless green hills and wild, brook-haunted glens, it is needless to say that my nerves recovered very substantially from the strain of New York. […] I now drank in to its fullest extent the miraculously preserved early-American life of the region.” — letter of 28th July 1928.
“No more likeable, breezy, & magnetic person ever existed than he [Vrest Orton]. In person of smallish size; dark, slender, handsome, & dashing, he is clean-shaven of face & jauntily fastidious of dress … He confessed to 30 years, but does not look more than 22 or 23. His voice is mellow & pleasant … & his manner of delivery sprightly & masculine — the careless heartiness of a well-bred young man of the world. … A thorough Yankee to the bone, he hails from central Vermont, adores his native state and means to return thither in a year, & detests N.Y. as heartily as I do. His ancestry is uniformly aristocratic — old New England on his father’s side, & on his mother’s side New England, Knickerbocker Dutch, & French Huguenot.” — letter quoted in I Am Providence.
One can see, if one looks closely, that the “smallish” Vrest is standing on a slightly raised lawn, about four inches higher than HPL, in the picture. Thus they appear to be about the same height. Some tactful visual height compensation has obviously been neatly arranged by the photographer. He also likely has boot-heels that add another inch, whereas HPL appears to have flatter old walking shoes.
This picture was made at a time when he was helping Orton to dam a hillside stream and divert it to make a new pool, so it also reflects that labour.
Postcard sent by Lovecraft during his 1928 stay with Vrest…
