Arched Smile
written by: Dee Allen
HOLLAND 1675
Godfried Schalken—one of his country’s best artists—suffered two losses of late: Gerrit Dou, his mentor, and Rose, Gerrit’s niece—the one he gave his love to. It’s a pity Schalken lost Rose to a rich, controlling, aggressive stranger, dripping with gold rings, a velvet cape, and unimagined power. That said, Schalken had to show up at the Church of Saint Laurence for Gerrit’s funeral. Compared to other services of its sort, the church funeral wake occurred at night and was sparsely attended. So few came to mourn the smartly-dressed, bearded old man lying in the maplewood coffin before them. Of course, Schalken shed his tears, paid final respects to his art teacher in the Protestant cathedral’s palace-like sanctuary of stone arches, columns, windows, and colossal pipe organ. Grieving in architectural paradise.
When the funeral wake was over, and the other mourners were leaving the sanctuary, Schalken alone wandered about the remainder of the grand church. Lost in memories. Mind hearkened back to the days in Gerrit’s home studio. For minutes on end, Rembrandt’s former student taught his own student his technique, conferred life to a blank canvas with coloured oil paints. There to witness brush magic, smiling blonde Rose, pleased with her love’s artistic progress.
His walk continued, a straight descent down grey stone steps in the direction of the basement. Once below, fatigue set in. Weariness of feet. Heaviness of eyelids. Schalken went to the floor and let the urge to sleep take its course.
“Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleepwalkers.”
The young Dutch painter—known for his night scenes, runaway ambition, and rotten temper—felt a hand tap on his shoulder. Upon awakening, he saw a chamber, deep in everblack, brightened. Flickering firelight from a candle in a brass holder. The fire also reveals an alluring blonde woman in a sheer white nightgown. Her face, he knew immediately: His beloved Rose Velderkaust. Greeting him with an arched smile. Schalken was all too delighted and curious in following her anywhere, even through the cold, ever-black, guided by a candle’s light. Stone steps that curved left, spiralled down, down, down into another basement, a narrow pathway that went farther, farther, farther—until Rose presented Schalken to a tidy, luxurious apartment furnished with antique movables, fit for the Dutch upper class. Alone in a corner of the room, a fancy four-poster bed with thick black curtains took up space. When Rose walked to the side of the bed, set the candle on a shelf, and pulled the curtains open, Schalken met with horror—arisen from the covers, sat upright with a hollow-eyed stare—Meneer Wilken Vanderhausen—gaunt, thin, shrivelled skin, blackened lips, long grey hair, match for his body’s pallor. Cadaverous. His rival for the hand of Rose. Smiling, on the verge of maniacal laughter, Rose was Pandora, lifting the lid off her ceramic jar and unleashing evil onto the world. This evil, a wealthy, rising corpse, ugly as the devil, was on the wrong side of the grave. Rose turned away from her former love’s gaze, faced the bed, and crouched over to join her husband. The unnatural, sickening sight of Rose rushing into the undead arms of Vanderhausen, warm flesh meeting colder, decrepit flesh, threw Schalken into abrupt shock—and onto the floor. Fainting spell—
“The dead and the living can never be one: God has forbidden it.”
The successful young painter from Leyden, famous and infamous, awakened to a stone floor—and shouts from a red-bearded groundskeeper with glasses. Exclamations of “get up” and “go to your own house and sleep because this is no place for lodging” from a man hired to close passages to funerary vaults started his morning. As he rose to his feet, Schalken noticed what he fell next to: A long stone coffin with an epitaph etched on the long lid:
HERE LIES
WILKEN VANDERHAUSEN
UNITED WITH HIS
BELOVED WIFE
Schalken walked the streets of Rotterdam—his adopted home city—with the strange events of the dark church vaults still fresh in his head. His fright. His curiosity. His bewilderment. His hate for Vanderhausen doubled. His love for Rose lay dying, then finally gone. On that four-poster bed. In that candle-lit cosy room. At that horrifying moment. Her arched smile, which won his instant attention, turned into a masque that hid mockery and madness.
“The darkness is unsafe.”
The time for worrying gave way to creativity. Back at home, Schalken rushed through the door, ignoring his maid, eyes on the studio. Grasped for coloured oil paints, a jar of water, brushes. Straight to work at the easel, bent on creating a vision Rembrandt Van Rijn and Gerrit Dou would be pleased to see—albeit bleak—
No one can deny the staying power of Godfried Schalken’s best-known night scene portrait. Or the tale it told from a surrounding frame. Background: A temple of sorts. Subject: A pleasant blonde maiden in a sheer white nightgown holds a candle-lamp, welcomes the viewer to her world. Both the lady and the lamp give light to an otherwise dark, dreary room. Behind her, against a marble column, stands a suited man—perhaps Schalken himself—drawing a sword from a hidden scabbard, anticipating his next lethal move on the lady with the lit candle and warm, arresting arched smile.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
Based on the 1839 short story Schalken The Painter by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
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