Portrait of the Artist's Father

In 1881 James Ensor was about 21, just out of the Brussels academy and still painting in dark, sober tones, years before the leering carnival masks that would make his name. The man here is his father, James Frederic Ensor, born in Brussels to English parents, an educated man who had trained as an engineer and read widely. In Ostend the family kept a souvenir shop full of masks, shells and Chinese curios, the very stock that would later crowd into his son's paintings. By this time the father had slipped into drink and a quiet decline. The son records him without flattery, the face built up in heavy, loaded brushwork against a shadowed ground.