Hi! I am doing a project about Edgar Allan Poe on Powerpoint. I need to find some good gothic-looking paintings or art to go on a slide. I need some help finding some grotesque paintings or pictures that would hold interest with my other students. I would really appreciate some help :) thanks!!!

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2003

Answers

I too am doing a report on Poe. Some good pictures can be found on www.google.com if you click the "Image" tab. I would give you sites, but I don't know what exactly your opinion is on "good gothic- looking paintings". Sometimes they give pictures of drawings from his books, or simply a drawing of Poe himself. He was a dark person (considered attractive in that era), and so maybe his picture would help. Either way, I find that the image search on google is helpful.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2003

knowingpoe.thinkport.org is a great interactive sight with illustrated works and variable audio readings and effects. Doing your own powerpoint with some gothic art sites might be a good idea. Contemporary romantic art to Poe is important to see what he saw(Auber and Weir landscapes for"Ulalume"). Fuseli's nightmare incubus, etc. The paintings described in "The Fall of the House of Usher" seem starkly abstract. "The Oval Portrait" captures the melancholy fading of the lady subject emptied of her vitality by the painter, the "Dorian Gray" dynamism plus "My Last Dutchess" by Browning.Clautrophobic, dark, tomblike architecture for other stories. The Maelstrom(the Norwegian islands have their own website!)as the image and example of Poe's abyss theme. The South Pole volcano. "The Raft of the Medusa" for Pym is too classically beautiful for the exaggerated horrors.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2003