Critical Introduction

While H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is among the most iconic figures in the history of the horror genre, Lovecraft only produced a single surviving image of this high priest of the Great Old Ones, the Elder Gods. The inscription on the sketch suggests that it was used as the basis for a sculpture by Lovecraft's childhood friend and eventual literary executor R. H. Barlow, though no such work has survived. Like most of Lovecraft's imagery, the description of Cthulhu is more allusive than precise. His writing style does not so much conjure specific beings and settings as it suggests impossible, unimaginable entities. “Unknown,” for example, appears nine times in the text of the short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Lovecraft describes an image of the Old One as, in essence indescribable:

In comparison, the sketch itself is somewhat surprising. While many modern images of Cthulhu attempt to present a dark, frightening horror, Lovecraft's is more melancholic. It seems to show a sculpture of the figure, seated atop a plinth marked with a cryptic, illegible script. The figure does seem scaly and winged in the manner of a dragon and anthropomorphic in overall shape, while the head is tentacled like an octopus. Further, we can see three eyes on the visible side of the head, suggesting six in total. The pose recalls Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture The Thinker (1880), which Lovecraft could have seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while living in New York in the 1920s, and this association amplifies the contemplative tone of the sketch.