A Colourist

James Ensor painted this in 1880, when he was only 20 and newly back in his family's house in the seaside town of Ostend, above the souvenir shop they kept. This is Ensor before the Ensor most people know. There are no masks here, no skeletons, none of the carnival grotesques that would crowd his work a few years later. Instead a woman sits at her trade in a dim room, a colourist, one of the many people who tinted prints and photographs by hand in the years before colour printing. He builds her out of low, smoky browns and greys, the somber palette of all his early interiors. The light gathers on her hands and on the sheet in front of her, which is exactly where the patient work of colouring gets done.