Godfried Schalcken

Godfried Schalcken learned to paint in the most demanding workshop in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, that of Gerard Dou, Rembrandt's first pupil and the founder of the fijnschilders, the 'fine painters' who worked on a small scale with an almost invisible polish. Schalcken took that polish and made one effect his own: a single candle flame in a dark room, and everything the light does to a face and a hand cupped around it.

He built a whole career on it. Small night scenes, lit by one candle, sold across Europe, and by the 1690s his name carried him to England and then to the court of the Elector Palatine at Düsseldorf, in Germany.

There is a famous story from his time in England. Asked to paint King William III by candlelight, Schalcken reportedly handed the king the candle to hold and kept him standing there until the hot tallow ran down over the royal fingers. Whether or not it happened quite that way, the portrait exists, the king lit from below by the flame in his own hand. Schalcken went on painting these dark, glowing pictures until he died at The Hague in 1706.