James Ensor · CC0
Fisher couple
Details
The story
Ensor was born in 1860, which makes him about 14 here. Mu.ZEE dates the panel to around 1873 to 1875, the very start of his working life, before the academy in Brussels and long before the masks.
Ostend in those years was being rebuilt into the grand seaside resort of Belgium, the summer town of King Leopold II, while the fishing fleet still worked off the same stretch of beach. The boy painted the fishing people and not the visitors.
The municipal museum in Ostend had been collecting early Ensors from 1893 onwards, and lost them in the bombing of May 1940. This panel arrived afterwards, a gift from the painter Alice Frey.
