This week on ‘picture postals from Lovecraft’, a continuation of last week’s theme. A look at some of the little side-ways that Lovecraft enjoyed and ventured down. Here is what looks like a press photograph (likely made with the ubiquitous pressman’s Rolleiflex square format camera, possibly late 1950s?). We see the Providence Art Club seen from an unusual angle. I’ve newly colorised the picture, which I’m fairly sure is from the Public Library collection.

A little way ahead of the cameraman, but before the artists on the sidewalk, we glimpse the archway and cobbled entrance… which was where Lovecraft used to often meet ‘Old Man’ after the master’s return to Providence…

He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in Cthulhu as the abode of the young artist […] Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance to one of those old-fashioned courtyard archways (formerly common everywhere) for which Providence is so noted. At night, when the electric lights make the street bright, the space within the archway would remain pitch-black, so that it looked like the mouth of an illimitable abyss, or the gateway of some nameless dimension. And there, as if stationed as a guardian of the unfathomed mysteries beyond, would crouch the sphinxlike, jet-black, yellow-eyed, & incredibly ancient form of Old Man. […] I came to regard him as an indispensable acquaintance, and would often go considerably out of my way to pass his habitual territory, on the chance that I might find him visible. Good Old Man! In fancy I pictured him as an hierophant of the mysteries behind the black archway, and wondered if he would ever invite me through it some midnight … Wondered, too, if I could ever could back to earth alive after accepting such an invitation.