Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s short fiction can be considered a liminal testing ground of Victorian darknesses. It presents states of exception which probe into the era’s most pervasive crises and thereby produce what one critic has called ‘a dark version of his century’s spiritual itinerary’. Le Fanu’s early ekphrastic story ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (1839) is one of the most complex treatments of darkness in Le Fanu’s oeuvre. The story’s centrality can be documented by its thematic and structural closeness to two other tales, which Le Fanu expanded into Uncle Silas and The Wyvern Mystery, two of his best-known novels. The story’s clear aesthetic structuring as a mysterious three-act drama organises far less palpable psychological, political and theological conflicts. They reveal dark abysses of Huguenot religious doubt, of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy’s paralysis and of the traumatised inner world of tabooed sexual desire. Based on the dynamics of repression and the return of the repressed, the fantastic imagery and bizarre character drawing of Le Fanu’s story illustrate the emotional turmoil caused by central darknesses of the Victorian age. ‘Schalken the Painter’ emerges as a prime example of the proto-modern perspectival diversity of Le Fanu’s short fiction, which is generated by its preoccupation with what Matthew Arnold called the era’s darkling plain.