Fort Napoleon

James Ensor painted this on 28 August 1876. He was 16, living above the curiosity shop his family kept in Ostend, and the fort out in the dunes was already an antique. It went up in 1811 on Napoleon's orders, a five-sided brick work raised largely by Spanish prisoners of war to hold the coast against a British landing that never came. What stands out about these teenage panels is the record-keeping. Ensor noted the date, and sometimes the hour, on the things he made, which tells you that at 16 he was already treating light as something that shifts while you work. He painted it on a board rather than canvas, in the last summer before he left for the academy in Brussels.