A Few Illustrated Depictions of Arthur Machen

H.P. Lovecraft has amassed quite a gallery of fantastic portraits over the years, depicting him as everything from all knowing demon prophet to American Colonial era gentleman. But what of the men who inspired Lovecraft? Though far less artistically celebrated than the illustrated Providence author, great weird writers like Arthur Machen have a few fanciful depictions to their name. This unlikely fact may surprise many readers of Machen. Nevertheless, see the images below as excellent evidence that there's a small cult of Machen devotees set on honoring the Welsh author by weaving him into his own literary themes and symbols.


An imposing portrait of Arthur Machen made by John Coulthart, a talented horror artist who has garnered approval in Lovecraftian circles and beyond. It seems Mr. Coulthart is well acquainted with the deeper roots of weird fiction. This Machen sketch nicely represents the inner spiritual anxiety of the weird writer that was a driving impulse behind much of the phenomena found in Machen's oeuvre.


This picture of a middle aged Arthur Machen peering out of an old window centers its attention at least as much, if not more, on the symbolic strangeness surrounding him. Anyone who has read any tales of Machen will immediately recognize the significance of the sinister Pagan face carved above him. Machen struggled to represent the dark, mysterious, and ancient forces beyond humanity as strongly as he could. In stories like "The Great God Pan" and "The White People," he succeeded. The haunting ruins of Roman and pre-Roman deities that surrounded Machen were critical influences on his own creative development. So, this unusual portrait is especially effective on a few levels. Not only does it solidify the weird and ominous mystery operating in Arthur Machen's work, but it highlights the same terrifying objects that inspired those works.


Here's a quality photoshop by Italian artist and blogger of the weird, Andrea Bonazzi. The artist's unique tablets, often implying a high octane mixture of Cthulhuvian and spiritual annihilation, are a comfortable fit for Machen. The young writer depicted here was no stranger to wrestling with horrors spiritual and intangible, though usually in a strongly Christian context. The somewhat ambiguous, but no less chilling specters of hell, forgotten (Pagan) deities, and uncontrolled nature explored by Arthur Machen all threatened to drag his characters' bodies toward destruction and their souls into the void. Bozzani realizes this, and his realistic insertion of his blasphemous tablet and the ghostly form of a satyr are wonderful representations of Machen's career. And what a career! Great weird literature was produced by a man clearly disturbed by the ideas that fueled his written yarns. Machen didn't write for fame or fortune. He wrote for intellectual therapy. His was an aesthetic career constantly haunted by unknown, spirit corroding influences that no civilized man should ever have to know.

-Grim Blogger