Flowers and Vegetables

By 1896 the painting Ensor is now famous for had been hanging in his own house in Ostend for eight years, seen by almost nobody. Les XX, the Brussels group he had helped to found, refused to show Christ's Entry into Brussels, and it stayed off public view until 1929. Recognition was arriving from a different direction. In 1895 the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels bought one of his paintings, a dark early interior of a boy with a lamp, and he had his first one-man show. What he was working on in these years came off the table and the market stall: flowers and vegetables, painted in the chalky pinks and greens he had taught himself in the 1880s. He was 36 and living above the family souvenir shop on the seafront, where the stock ran to shells, fans and carnival masks.