The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

"Schalken the Painter" (1839)  

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

“Schalken the Painter” was written by J. Sheridan Le Fanu and first appeared in Dublin University Magazine (May 1839). Le Fanu (1814-1873) was a noted Irish poet, novelist, and author of short horror stories. He wrote widely, but it is “Carmilla,” along with “Green Tea,” for which he is best-known. “Schalken the Painter” is one of the nineteenth century’s best horror stories.

As an older man Godfrey Schalken is a celebrated portraitist. He is uncouth and boorish but is also a “most cunning worker in oils, whose pieces delight the critics of our day almost as much as his manners disgusted the refined of his own.”¹ In his youth, however, he suffered a great loss. As a young man Schalken is the student of Gerard Douw, the “immortal” Dutch painter. Schalken fell in love with Douw’s niece and ward, the beautiful Rose Velderkaust. For her part Rose was in love with Schalken, although she was only sixteen years old. But Schalken is poor and has no reputation, so he must earn his place in the world before he can marry Rose. However, one night a stranger approaches Schalken. The stranger is richly dressed but has an odd and unwholesome air and is attired so that his face is not visible. He asks Schalken to arrange a meeting with Gerard Douw for the following night. The stranger, who calls himself Minheer Vanderhausen, arrives at the appointed time and immediately gives Schalken a box and asks him to go to a jeweler to be valued. Schalken does so and finds the box to contain pure, unalloyed gold. As Schalken is running this errand Vanderhausen speaks with Douw. Vanderhausen says that he saw Rose and Douw in the church of St. Lawrence four months ago and that he wishes to marry Rose. Vanderhausen’s approach is not romantic; he simply says that “if I satisfy you that I am wealthier than any husband you can dream of for her, I expect that you will forward my suit with your authority.”² Douw does not like Vanderhausen, but the stranger insists on an immediate answer, and the money appeals to Douw more than his ward’s happiness, so Douw assents and arranges for a dinner with Vanderhausen, Rose, and Schalken the following night. Vanderhausen then produces a form which states that an engagement has been entered into between Vanderhausen and Rose. Schalken is called upon to witness Douw’s signature. Douw does not immediately tell Rose what has happened, but instead tells her that a friend will be dining with them tomorrow night, and “do you trick yourself out handsomely. I will not have him think us poor or sluttish.”³ 

Vanderhausen arrives for dinner, but things do not go well. Vanderhausen is not attractive when seen in the full light:

all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was, consequently, nearly black; and the entire character of the face was sensual, malignant, and even satanic....there was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, unhuman; it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery...during his stay his eyelids did not once close, or, indeed, move in the slightest degree....⁴ 

Rose is repelled by Vanderhausen. She almost screams when she sees him and she tells Douw that “when I saw him standing at the door, I could not get it out of my head that I saw the old painted wooden figure that used to frighten me so much in the Church of St. Laurence at Rotterdam.”⁵ But the next day the contract of marriage arrives, and a few days later, despite Rose’s reaction to Vanderhausen, the marriage takes place. Schalken leaves school briefly, but returns and resumes painting, with his love for Rose being replaced by ambition. Months pass, and Douw hears nothing from Rose, and he begins to worry about her. He goes looking for Vanderhausen in Rotterdam but is unable to find anything about him. But one night someone bangs on Douw’s door. It is Rose, dressed in a winding sheet, looking “wild, fierce and haggard with terror and exertion.”⁶ In a manner most unlike her previous innocent and good-humored fashion she demands wine, food, and then a minister: “Oh, that the holy man were here...he can deliver me; the dead and the living can never be one: God has forbidden it.”⁷ Rose insists that Douw and Schalken not leave her alone, because she is sure that Vanderhausen has followed her into the house, although Schalken only sees a “shadowy and ill-defined form.”⁸ Unfortunately Douw does not pay close enough attention to Rose’s words, for he leaves the room to get another candle for her, and when he does that the door to the room slams shut, and Douw and Schalken cannot open it. Rose’s screams are heard, and then a window can be heard opening, and then there is “one last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human.”⁹ Douw and Schalken hear steps crossing the floor, from the bed to the window, and then the door gives way. The room is empty, and when Schalken runs to the open window he sees, or thinks he sees, “the waters of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circles, as if a moment before disturbed by the submission of some ponderous body.”¹⁰ Rose’s body is never found. But many years later Schalken, returning to Rotterdam for a funeral, goes to the church of St. Laurence and falls asleep. He has a dream in which Rose appears to him, not looking sad but rather wearing “the same arch smile which used to enchant the artist long before in his happy days.”¹¹ Rose leads him down into the vaults, into what seems to be an “old-fashioned Dutch apartment.” In the apartment is a four post bed, enclosed by curtains. Rose pulls the curtains aside and shows him “sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen.”¹² Schalken then falls senseless on the floor, and is found the next day in the vaults by church workers.

“Schalken the Painter” is one of the first modern supernatural stories. Unlike earlier stories of the supernatural it is completely divorced from its Gothic predecessors. (Although the marriage between Rose and Vanderhausen is a Gothic trope: the fatal union that “culminates in the corruption of innocence and the destruction of the female.”¹³) And unlike Scott’s “Wandering Willie’s Tale” “Schalken the Painter” has nothing to do with folklore.

With ‘Schalken the Painter’ Le Fanu had clearly mastered a new kind of supernatural tale, which accepts and utilizes the reader’s skepticism. Schalken’s adventure barely allows for a natural explanation. He loses Rose to a sinister, rich, corpse-like old man; Rose flees from her husband, with an incoherent story, but then vanishes; later Schalken sees her, or thinks he does, living in a tomb. The sinister old man may simply be an old man, not an animated corpse; the frightened heroine may be hallucinating, or hysterical; doors can slam shut by other than supernatural agency; Rose may have leaped from a window to her death, not been carried off through the air; Schalken has fallen asleep before he sees her in the tomb. Like Schalken, the reader assumes the supernatural element, involving marriage with the dead, but we cannot be sure. The story marks Le Fanu’s first completely successful use of the new method, building the story on both doubt and fear, leaving the supernatural presence unexplained and still powerful—or, in other words, creating a mystery and then maintaining that mystery. As with so many speculations about the supernatural, whether religious or merely superstitious, we finally do not know.¹⁴ 

For its contemporary readers, “Schalken the Painter” was sui generis, but modern readers can see the story for what it is: one of the first modern supernatural stories as well as one of the first to add psychological dimensions. Ghost stories during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras tended to be “a melodramatic warning, a harbinger of doom, or an outward manifestation of an individual’s guilt.”¹⁵ In the Gothics ghosts were primarily used to terrify rather than to teach moral lessons. After the Gothics "writers in Britain, Europe and America soon realised that the most effective ghost stories were reasonably short, for a substantial novel typically struggled to avoid becoming padded out with non-supernatural scenes or degenerating into repetition."¹⁶ 

What followed were stories intercalated into novels but separated from the main text, such as Walter Scott’s "Wandering Willie's Tale" and Charles Dickens’ “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” (from The Pickwick Papers, 1836-1837), and then self-contained short stories such as “Schalken the Painter,” which was to prove so influential on the development of the ghost story over the next few decades.

“Schalken the Painter” is told in Le Fanu’s usual style, which lacks much of the old-fashioned tone and pace of many his contemporaries. Le Fanu does not spell out everything, but lets some things, especially the more horrific aspects of the story, be told by implication, or to settle in on reflection of the story. The premise of the story–a dead man marries a living woman–is entertaining enough, if not overwhelming. And Le Fanu’s execution of the story is enjoyable, but he is not the stylist that later writers of tales of terror were. What makes “Schalken” stand out are the gaps, the things which Le Fanu omits and leaves the reader to consider: what, exactly, was so ghastly about being married to a dead man, that Rose reacted so badly? When Vanderhausen confronts Rose in the bedroom, what was he doing, behind those closed doors, to make her shriek so horrifyingly and throw herself into the canal? And what is the meaning of the final dream–is Rose happy with her husband, now that she is dead? The reader is left with questions and no answers, only unsettling implications.

Recommended Edition

Print: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Schalken the Painter and Others: Ghost Stories 1838-61. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2002.

Online: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lefanu/schalken/