Music in the Vlaanderenstraat

Ostend in 1891 was Belgium's seaside season town, and the Vlaanderenstraat carried the traffic from the beach into the middle of it. Ensor lived at the top of that street in his parents' house, above the family shop that sold seashells, chinoiserie and carnival masks to the summer visitors, and he worked in the attic under the tiles. That is where this view is taken from. He looks straight down, so the street becomes a canyon of chimneys and red roofs, and the band passing through it is a mass of small figures rather than players you could pick out. He had already made the same scene as an etching the year before. A Belgian tricolour hangs from the corner house on the left. The picture itself is tiny, about 24 centimetres tall, painted a year after The Intrigue, the big masked crowd that hangs in the same museum in Antwerp.