A picture of a lithograph by Athos Zacharias, titled “Between Waterman and College Streets”, on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. What date was it made? Well, Zacharias was born 1927, so although spuriously dated “1900” on its record-page this is likely to be post-war graduation work made while at Rhode Island School of Design. Zacharias graduated from RISD in 1952.

Does it relate to Lovecraft and No. 66 College Street? Probably it’s just an abstracted architectural collage-in-drawing lithograph, though the title, choice of subject and precise position are all rather intriguing re: the possibility that it was meant to evoke the location and spirit of Lovecraft’s last home. The ‘monitor roof’ windows seen in the lower foreground don’t quite match those of No. 66, though, and the whitewash would have had to have peeled off the chimney-bricks between 1937 and 1951. But who knows, perhaps we can fancy that Zacharias read an early Lovecraft collection and then had the cultural-historical foresight to go try to make art at the site? The house was moved to a new site in 1959, so in circa 1951/52 it would still have been there.

Even if the drawing doesn’t show No. 66 in the lower-left then — as a slightly sinister artwork of spidery trees and eye-boggling shifts in building scales — it still unconsciously evokes something of Lovecraft. Also his tucked-away courtyard garden at No. 66, in the shadow of the John Hay Library.