Something that gave H.P. Lovecraft nightmares is the work of my favorite artist. In "At the Mountains of Madness" he specifically mentions "the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich."
This is what Roerich's paintings look like:
#hp lovecraft thought penguins were grotesque and horrifying#he was not a difficult man to frighten
It genuinely never occurred to me that there could be an actual real-world artist that he was referring to. Holy shit. Those are... extremely not horrifying.
the artist isn't even Asian
paintings of Asian-inspired landscapes by a white guy terrified H.P. Lovecraft
Im currently reading the author who inspired HP Lovecraft, a pre WW1 folk horror writer called Arthur Machen
and the bar is low, it's like - weird stuff happens and sometimes we don't know why
what if the local myths of scary things were true, maybe - and we don't know why
what if people sometimes went mad and we don't know why
what if people still worshipped cletic gods and we don't know why
i get the impression plum jam served with scones instead of strawberry would have given HP Lovecraft the heebie jeebies
It's unfair to use these beautiful landscape paintings and claim that these were the ones that scared Lovecraft. Because while Roerich did indeed paint perfectly naturalistic landscapes some of his paintings show supernatural things and would be concerning if you actually saw them in reality:
And given that "The mountains of madness" is a story about shoggoths living in a city on top of the highest mountains it is likely that Lovecraft was thinking about the second picture, not the one with the alpine meadow.















