Girl with upturned Nose

In 1879 Ensor was 19 and two years into the Royal Academy in Brussels, where students still spent their days drawing from plaster casts and antique models. He disliked the place and went on saying so for the rest of his life. The heads he painted on his own account in those years, this one among them, are worked in the dark, heavy palette of his earliest work, before the colour came. Nobody wrote down who the girl was. The picture is small, about 54 by 45 centimetres, painted on canvas that was later laid on panel, and it belongs to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which reopened in 2022 after 11 years of rebuilding.