This week for my regular ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ post, a look at the place where (in the eyes of the New England doctors) Lovecraft’s character of Dexter Ward veered into the occult and went mad…

… he had begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home […] The beginning of Ward’s madness is a matter of dispute among alienists [i.e. psychiatrists]. Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy’s last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify for college [i.e. university] on the ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make.

It’s not stated in the novel that Dexter Ward frequented the school’s Art Studio, seen here in both a rare exterior and an interior view. But it seems likely there were at least lessons there, and also that his initial burst of “zest in the military training of the period” only lasted a few months at the school. The burst being in August 1918 — and quite understandable in the context of what we now know to have been the final three months of the First World War and the possibility of a lad shipping out to France and seeing some action. This of course reflects Lovecraft’s own short-lived zeal for such.