Large seascape - Sunset

Between 1880 and 1885 Ensor painted the North Sea over and over from his home town of Ostend, watching cloud, mist and wind change its colour through the day. This canvas comes at the very end of that run, and at more than one and a half metres wide it is one of the largest he gave the subject. It shows a heavy rain shower moving across the water as the sun goes down. The rain hangs from the top of the picture in long streaks, and just above the horizon a thin red line marks the sunset. Dark weather, in Ensor's hands, becomes blues, greys and white, worked through with browns and a strong orange. Five years earlier, in After the Storm, he had caught the wet, clearing air just after a squall. The Flemish online Ensor catalogue notes that here the handling is more deliberate and the light more carefully worked out.