Pierrot's despair

Pierrot is the pale, moping clown of old pantomime, the one who always loses the girl, and Ensor sets him here slumped in his loose white costume while a scatter of grotesque, grinning faces presses in around him. The picture carries the date 1892, yet scholars place it around 1910, one of those cases where Ensor signed an older year onto later work. By then his most daring paintings were two decades behind him, and Pierrot, the sad outsider mocked by the crowd, was a figure he plainly felt close to. The colours are soft and chalky, pinks and pale blues, and the mockers are thinly sketched, half-dissolved, so the clown's gloom is the one solid thing on the canvas.