“Death, the Avenger” (based on a description by the poet Heinrich Heine of the outbreak of cholera at a masked ball in Paris in 1831). 1851 engraving by Alfred Rethel (1816–1859), from A History of Everyday Things in England : 1733-1851.

The pestilence was awaited with comparative indifference, because the news from London was that it carried off comparatively few … [during the day] the Parisians streamed merrily to the boulevards to look at the masks, which held up to ridicule the fear of the cholera and the disease itself, by all sorts of monstrous caricatures. The public balls [that night] were fuller than ever that evening; insane peals of laughter almost drowned the music. People got heated in the Chahut, a dance of no doubtful character, swallowed ices and cold drinks … and then, all of a sudden, the gayest of the harlequins felt a strange chill in his limbs, and took off his mask; when, to the amazement of all, his face was seen to be violet blue. It was soon found that this was not a joke, and the laughter ceased; wagons full of men were taken from the hall to the hospital of the Hotel Dieu, where, all dressed in their masquerading habits, they straightway died. As the theory of infection prevailed in the first excitement, and the other inmates of the Hotel Dieu shrieked in terror, it is said that the earliest victims were so hastily buried that they were not even stripped of their motley dresses, so that they lie in the grave as merrily as they lived. — Heinrich Heine.

Presumably an influence on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and also on Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”…

… the open windows — gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company, indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before; and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections; others were utterly alien. I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation. The nightmare was quick to come; for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape; overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors. — from “The Outsider”.

Edithemad’s work-in-progress Cthulhu statuette. Based on the rough sketch that Lovecraft’s limited art skills were capable of, to suggest the basics of the cultists’ alien statuette of Cthulhu…

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered … No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone. The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way clown toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. Something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

The sketch was made in 1934 for Barlow. Barlow was at that time a sculptor and painter, in addition to his many other talents. According to someone who visited the untouched Lovecraft bedroom shortly after Lovecraft’s death, many of Barlow’s artworks adorned Lovecraft’s tiny bedroom in the late 1930s, along with ancient sculptures from antiquity that Loveman had given him as presents (possibly originally from the Hart Crane collection of such). One then wonders if Barlow ever tried his hand at a sculpture similar to that seen above, based on the sketch? That seems to be implied, in the text below the sketch. If so, the sculpture doesn’t seem to have survived, or it would have been known to Lovecraft fans. Possibly it’s still sitting in a junk shop or curio collector’s cabinet down Mexico City way, unregarded.

Where did Barlow’s other sculpture end up? It seems that not a whit of what he made has survived. He wrote to Clark Ashton Smith (16th May 1937) of his…

disgust at the ineffable stupidity of editors and readers [word or line skipped by Barlow or transcriber] think that some of my best recent work is in sculpture: and there I find myself confronted with another blank wall of stupidity. Oh well and oh hell: some one will make a “discovery” [of the sculpture] when I am safely dead or incarcerated…

One would like to think that there’s a crate of it in storage in the basement of a Mexico City museum, perhaps along with the lost H.S. Whitehead letters (which Barlow collected, but which mysteriously vanished).

Below are sketches of the North End of Boston (“Pickman’s Model”) more or less as Lovecraft might have seen it.

The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he’d put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don’t you realise that places like that weren’t merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren’t afraid to live and feel and die. Don’t you know there was a mill on Copp’s Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? I can shew you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder.” —Pickman, in “Pickman’s Model”.

Nearly all from the book Rambles in old Boston, New England (1887)…

Old Ruin, 341 North St, Boston. It joined with the old Tremere House.

The Old Ruin by another artist (Minot Lane), 1881. Possibly a more faithful rendering of its decrepitude.

Page’s Court, directly opposite the Old Ruin.

Alley leading to the Old Ruin area of North Street.

Rear of the Tremere House.

Here we see one of the urchins that abounded in the North End. In a 1923 letter to Galpin he said of the North End that… “this part of the town is abominably squalid, and inhabited by peasant Italians of the filthiest description.” In his essay on Quebec, Lovecraft notes that a certain street there abounded… “with mendicant [begging] children reminding one of the small Italian boys in Boston’s North End”. He had earlier elborated on this aspect of the place in a 1923 letter to Kleiner… “an Italian quarter of the most squalid sort; as insistently dinned into my ears & consciousness by a horde of ragged little ciceroni who surrounded me & blocked my feet … It was worth a handful of farthings to be rid of these small highway-men, whose desire to instruct the traveller is not unmixt with a craving after sweetmeats.”

The mysterious tunnel:

Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other’s houses, and the burying-ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground—things went on every day that they couldn’t reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn’t place!” — Pickman, in “Pickman’s Model”.

A long-standing Boston bookshop.

In a 1923 letter to Galpin, Lovecraft tells of how he indulged his delight in old lamps and lighting by buying one…

On Saturday, the following day, Mrs. Miniter, Cole, and myself, made an exhaustive tour of historick sites [in the North End, including Revere’s house]. … There were on sale replicas of the old 18th century lanthorns which Revere fashioned, as well as pewter spoons newly struck from his own well-preserv’d moulds. I obtain’d a lanthorn for myself … I shew’d Mrs. Miniter the only two 17th century houses besides Revere’s — structures of which despite her antiquarian erudition she was previously ignorant. They are ill-kept, and in frightful slums; some society shou’d reclaim them.”

Ancient lantern (lanthorn) of the type sold at the Revere house, and purchased by Lovecraft.

A 1934 Lovecraft letter to Rimmel tells of how the North End studio in “Pickman’s Model” was based on a real house…

…many of these old tangled alleys have now been swept away by civic change — the ancient houses demolished, and warehouses erected on their site. I remember when the precise location of the artist’s house in the story was hit by the razing process. It was in 1927, and Donald Wandrei … was visiting the East for the first time. He wanted to see the site of the story. and I was very glad to take him to it thinking that its sinister quaintness would even surpass his expectations. Imagine my dismay, then, at finding nothing but a blank open space where the tottering old houses and zigzag alley-windings had been! It took me all more aback because they were still there as late as the preceding summer. Well — Wandrei had to accept my word about what had been there, although we could still trace the course of the principal cobblestoned lane among the gaping foundation walls. A year later the whole thing was covered up with a great brick building.” (Selected Letters IV, pp.385-386)