Pickman's Model

There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers – and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time!

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true.

Pickman was in every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist

Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined