 <p>Ok, lets try to make sure that the image is visible in QWebView at all and you indeed have a problem with PDF conversion. So you need to run this and see if it works:</p> <pre><code>import sys from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore, QtWebKit class MyWin(QtGui.QWidget): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) self.setLayout(QtGui.QVBoxLayout()) self.view = QtWebKit.QWebView(self) self.layout().addWidget(self.view) self.view.setHtml(''' ... &lt;img src="star.jpg" /&gt; ... ''', QtCore.QUrl.fromLocalFile("/var/www/icons/") ) if __name__ == '__main__': app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv) win = MyWin() win.show() sys.exit(app.exec_()) </code></pre>