When in Providence Lovecraft greatly enjoyed visiting nearby Newport, although the trip involved a long and sometimes chilly boat trip. One of the attractions of the place was its antiquities and perhaps its many grand mansions. Including a monstrous castle which could have come straight from one of Lovecraft’s tales…

The vast structure was however wryly called a “Cottage” by the inhabitants of this isolated shoreline castle. It was demolished in 1924, but Joshi has Lovecraft visiting Newport as early as 1915. He also went to Newport with Sonia just prior to the New York years, which gave rise to the joint tale “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”. The above mansion was still there at that time. In the tale such structures offer a key setting…

It was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a rising moon began to make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is important to remember, for every impression counts. On the beach were several strollers and a few late bathers; stragglers from the distant cottage colony that rose modestly on a green hill to the north, or from the adjacent cliff-perched [Wavecrest] Inn whose imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance to wealth and grandeur.

Now, Lovecraft’s “Inn” is hardly rustic, since it is described as having an ornate balcony and a “sumptuous ballroom” inside. It operates as a very upmarket “hotel”. The setting is then similar to that of the mansion on the postcard. More so when one knows that this real-world monstrous “Cottage” castle was apparently adjacent across the water to a far more alluring “cottage colony” of writers, as in the story. The name is also similar, the mansion being dubbed ‘Breakwater’ in reality, and ‘Wavecrest’ in the tale. All this suggests that the postcard shows the setting of a Lovecraft tale, albeit a joint tale.

There are two illustrated books on the topic, free on Archive.org, A Guidebook to Newport Mansions and Newport mansions: the Gilded Age, each giving views inside such structures as survived into the 1980s.

There’s a new and interesting scientific wrinkle on Lovecraft and ‘fear of the dark’. You’ll recall that Lovecraft had darkish hazel-brown eyes. A new pre-print research paper from Liverpool in the UK tested the “Effect of iris pigmentation of blue and brown eyed individuals” of European descent, in terms of their low-light vision. They found that…

Blue eyed individuals were identified to have significantly better ability to see in lower lighting

… after a short adaptation period. In other words, after a short time of ‘letting your eyes get used to the lowering light’. The authors suggest that the already-known susceptibility of blue eyes to ‘straylight'(*) is the likely cause, providing just…

enough luminance to provide blue-eyed individuals with a visual advantage to make out shapes

… with relative speed in lowering-light environments. Such as hunting at dusk. This seems plausible, though note that the study has a small sample size.

But the implications for Lovecraft is that as an adult he saw darkness as more of a ‘void’ than he might have done if he really had been a blue-eyed Nordic type. Although in 1923 he joshed with the Mediterranean-favouring Belknap Long in a letter that he was really a Nordic, and thus entitled to imagine himself…

a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares — aye — I speak truly — for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes — the latter not turning dark till I was nearly two, and the former lasting till I was over five? Ho, for the hunting and fishing in Valhalla!

Thus, there may have been a ‘double impact’ here for Lovecraft in early childhood. An imaginative tot’s intense fear of the dark exacerbated by his blue eyes, until the age of two, due to good perception of subtle shapes in the dark. Then a strong and perhaps sudden lessening of this ability, leading to the increasingly imaginative child’s fear that the terribly phantasmal shapes were still there in the dusk, but were now dangerously unseen…

Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.” (Necronomicon).

You’ll recall also Lovecraft’s early fear of the dark. Evidenced by the lengths his grandfather went to, to try to cure the boy of it. Also his love of cats, friendly creatures able to see relatively easily in the very low light.

* straylight — “light that enters the eye but does not reach the retina in a focused manner”