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
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