The mysterious and mystical narratives of European, American and Australian writers of the 19th - early 20th centuries collected in this book are united by the end-to-end image of a mysterious portrait, living a hidden fantastic life, endowed with extraordinary properties and capable of exerting a fatal influence on the fate of its prototype, as well as on the fate of their viewers and owners. Introduced into literature by Horace Walpole, the author of the Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), this image turned out to be extremely popular in gloomy stories about otherworldly prophecies, family curses and retribution from the other world, and was later widely developed in romantic and post-romantic stories about the nature of art and the artist’s mission, having found canonical embodiment in two world-famous masterpieces - N. V. Gogol’s story “Portrait” and O. Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. The book's repertoire of subjects and characters includes hereditary madness, captured by the artist's brush, and dangerous love affairs with infernal creatures, a seductive vampire and the devil's bride, who gained immortality on the canvas, ghosts commissioning their own portraits, and a cunning killer playing on the superstitious legends that surround antique canvases...