In the narrator’s description of the portrait of a young woman which he finds inside the abandoned chateau, his language foreshadows later revelations in the short story concerning the fate of the painting’s subject. As he examines the painting, he states that:
As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea—must have prevented even its momentary entertainment.
The narrator's description of the painting emphasizes its surprisingly lifelike nature. First, he praises the “immortal beauty” of the face depicted in the painting. As he reflects on his own initial shock upon seeing the portrait, he attributes his sense of surprise to its resemblance to “a living person.” Though the narrator does not yet know anything about the background of the painting at this point in the story, his language unknowingly foreshadows his later discoveries. As he will learn, the painting was completed in a vampiric fashion, at the cost of its subject’s life. The narrator, then, almost intuitively understands that such a lifelike painting has come at the expense of actual life, as the story will later confirm.
