Inspiration
The book referred to in the story – Filippo Pigafetta's Regnum Congo – actually exists. According to S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's knowledge of the work derives from Thomas Henry Huxley's Man's Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays. A number of Lovecraft's descriptions of the book are incorrect as he never saw the actual book.
The ending of the story, in which the narrator is saved by a thunderbolt that destroys the ancient house, may have been inspired by the similar ending of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".
Critic Jason Eckhardt suggested that the dialect the unnaturally aged man uses in the story is derived from one used in James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers (1848–62). Even in Lowell's time, the dialect was thought to be long extinct.
Peter Cannon has pointed to parallels between "The Picture in the House" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches".
Read more about this topic: The Picture In The House
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)