Peonies and Poppies

Belgian painters had been turning out flower pieces for decades by the 1880s, and a good deal of that work, as the curators of a recent exhibition in Ostend put it, had become showy decoration with little behind it. Ensor was 23 in 1883 when he painted this one, and he made it big, about 1.36 metres tall, a size more usual for a portrait than for a table of flowers. Peonies and poppies fill two vases standing side by side. The picture has stayed in private hands, so it is rarely on view. In 2007 it hung in New York, in the first show of his paintings there in 30 years. In the winter of 2023 to 2024 it came home to Ostend, where the museum Mu.ZEE gathered about 50 of his still lifes and hung them close together, the way 19th-century museums did.