Schalken the Painter | A Ghost Story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu | A Bitesized Audiobook

In 17th century Leiden, Godfrey Schalken is a pupil of the celebrated artist Gerard Douw. He is secretly in love with his master's ward, Rose, and she reciprocates – but he needs to work hard and make a name for himself before they will be allowed to marry. All seems set fair, until the arrival of a mysterious, and terrifying, stranger... A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, you may like to consider supporting me on Patreon:   / bitesizedaudio   Or for occasional one-off contributions, you can Buy Me a Coffee here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bitesize... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish author who was arguably the most important single contributor to the development of the literary ghost story in the Victorian era, hugely influential on future generations of authors including E. F. Benson and M. R. James, who described him as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". He was born in Dublin into a literary family; his mother and grandmother were writers, and his great uncle was the celebrated playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ('The Rivals' etc), and his niece Rhoda Broughton also became a popular writer of ghost stories later in the 19th century. He wrote in many genres, but his best known works are his contributions to gothic horror and supernatural novels and novellas, including 'Uncle Silas' (1864), 'Green Tea' (1869) and 'Carmilla' (1872), one of the earliest vampire stories. Perhaps his best-known shorter ghost story is 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street' (1853). He published many short ghost and mystery stories in various magazines in Ireland and England from the 1850s through to the early 1870s, although they remained uncollected in book form until 1923 when M. R. James compiled and edited the volume 'Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery', which revived interest in his work some 50 years after Le Fanu's death. 'Schalken the Painter' was first published in the Dublin University Magazine in May 1839. A revised version of the text was published in 'The Purcell Papers' in 1880, under the expanded title 'Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter'. The story is the same in the latter version but the opening section is extended with a framing section presented as an extract "from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P. P. of Drumcoolagh", relating the story as told to him by a Captain Vandael, whose father knew Schalken and heard it first hand from him. The text read here is the original, and simpler, 1839 version. The characters of Schalken and Gerard Douw are based upon real people. Godfried Schalcken, or Gottfried Schalken (1643–1706), was a Dutch genre and portrait painter, and he did indeed study under Gerard Douw, more commonly known as Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), although the character of Rose appears to be an invention of Le Fanu's. The painting on the title card is a detail of a self-portrait by Godfried Schalcken, dating from 1695. The music used for the introduction to this piece is from 'Duet For Two Violins', Op 5 N2: Larghetto, by Luigi Boccherini. Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.