Old man

In 1878 James Ensor was 18 and a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Teaching there still rested on the old routine of drawing and painting from a hired model, posed in the studio for the whole class to work from. This canvas comes out of that routine. Mu.ZEE, the museum that owns it, describes it as a study from a living model, and it shows a bearded old man stripped to the waist, one arm folded across his body. The sitter's name was not recorded. The canvas is about a metre tall. Ensor left the Academy in 1880 and went back to Ostend, the seaside town where he was born, and the study is in Ostend now too, at Mu.ZEE, the city's art museum.