Flowers and blue vase

A loose bunch of flowers in a blue vase, painted in 1909, is the kind of modest subject Ensor favoured in his later years. What makes this canvas interesting now is what conservators have found inside its paint. Examined under ultraviolet and X-ray light, it gives up the materials of his palette, the greenish glow of zinc white and the orange fluorescence of a red lake, the same kind of analysis that reveals how such colours shift and fade across a century. As a picture it is unhurried: he built the bouquet from quick, thick dabs and let the solid blue of the vase steady the looser tangle of petals above it.