In Which the Internet Is a Boon to Culture and the Arts

The narrator in H. P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness continually references the paintings of Nicholas Roerich in his attempts to convey the unutterable horrors of the city of the Old Ones in their mountain fastness deep in the antarctic.

Were I reading this in paperback, it is likely I would finish the story and forget the name Roerich and never see his work.  Even if I remembered and wanted to see his work, without the internet that would involve at minimum a trip to a library, a search through their catalog, and probably one or two pictures in an anthology.  Possibly, if I lived in the right city, a museum might have a few of his works on display (and then I would need the time and resources to get there). 

But I am reading H.P. Lovecraft on the internet, courtesy of DagonBytes, and I paused to google Nicholas Roerich, expecting perhaps one or two uploads of photos of his work and a wikipedia summary.  Instead, courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, I found a wonderfully magnanimous upload of full-color, high-quality pictures of Roerich's work, organized into slideshows by topic, freely available to anyone with internet. 


This is a tiny but wonderful example of how free access to information immeasurably enriches our lives.   


Turns out I really enjoy Roerich's works (although not enough to want to hang reproductions on my walls): 

Karakoram.  From the Nicholas Roerich Museum.

 From Lovecraft's prose I was expecting something like "Edvard Munch and M.C. Escher go on an LSD trip together", but Roerich's mountains do not go beyond the stark, breathtaking vastness and barrenness of the photos of Central Asia that I've seen while paging through books in the university library.  Lovecraft's gift and craft, though, was to find madness in everything. 

If I were going to use a Roerich painting as the basis for a horror story, I'd use this one:

The Treasure of the Angels.  From the Nicholas Roerich Museum.