The Dutch painter, Godefridus Schalcken (1643–1706), may no longer enjoy the fame that his fellow artists Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer do today, but he surely ranks among the most renowned painters of his own era. Largely raised in Dordrecht, where his father, Cornelis, was headmaster of the city's Latin School, Schalcken received his initial training (c. 1658/60–c. 1662) with Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678), a former pupil of Rembrandt's who enjoyed an international career as a respected artist. Van Hoogstraten departed for England in spring of 1662, so around that time Schalcken moved to Leiden where he entered the studio of the preeminent genre painter in the Dutch Republic, Gerrit Dou (1613–1675). The young man would spend several years under Dou's tutelage, mastering the latter's smooth and meticulous method of applying paint, which later generations of connoisseurs would identify as the fijnschilder or fine painting style. During the late 1650s Dou had also expanded his thematic repertoire to include night scenes (Fig. 1), which must have made an indelible impression upon Schalcken, who himself would become late seventeenth-century Europe's greatest candlelight painter.

Upon his return to Dordrecht, Schalcken's star rapidly rose among cognoscenti in his hometown and elsewhere in the Netherlands. He emerged as an outstanding specialist in genre painting and became an accomplished portraitist as well. Within just a few years, our painter's fame had reached truly international heights with clientele in France, the Spanish Netherlands, and in various German principalities. During the last fifteen years of his life, Schalcken embarked upon travels abroad in order to satisfy the demands of his ever growing clientele and to augment his status as a renowned artist. Schalcken initiated this enterprise in the late spring of 1692 when he resettled in London where he would live and work for roughly the next four years.

Despite the importance of Schalcken's so-called English period, both for his own career and for other painters of the time, his sojourn in London has barely been studied and hence remains shrouded in obscurity.