Bathing-hut

Ensor was 16 in the summer of 1876, painting on the beach at Ostend one or two mornings or afternoons a week and turning out about 40 small studies over the year. This is one of them, oil on a piece of pink cardboard, roughly 18 by 23 centimetres. On the back he noted the day and the hour, Sunday 29 July 1876, afternoon, along with the numbers of two bathing huts. 29 July that year was a Saturday. The hut is one of the wheeled cabins a horse would pull down to the water so that bathers could change inside and step straight into the sea. There are grains of sand stuck in the paint.