The Oval Portrait
Complete textA wounded traveler takes shelter in an apparently deserted château and becomes absorbed in its paintings. One portrait's uncanny lifelikeness leads him to consult a written account, bringing another relationship between an artist and his subject into the room.
Continue readingAbout The Oval Portrait
The outer frame emphasizes uncertain perception, pain and changing light before introducing an apparently explanatory text. Looking and making are therefore both open to scrutiny. The short narrative asks what a convincing image may exclude, particularly when artistic attention becomes so concentrated that the living person is treated chiefly as a subject.
Reading focus
Read the traveler's act of looking beside the painter's attention to distinguish an image from a living presence.
This reading edition contains 1,289 words in 1 original section. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an…
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This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 1 section and 1,289 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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