Portrait of Willy Finch

Ensor was 22 when he painted this, working in the attic of his parents' house in Ostend, above the family shop that sold shells, chinoiserie and carnival masks to summer visitors. The sitter is Willy Finch, a painter friend from the same town, born in Brussels to English parents, who worked beside him in that attic. The following year both of them were among the founders of Les XX, the Brussels group that spent the next decade showing what the Belgian salons would not. Finch then went a long way off. In 1897 he moved to Finland to run the pottery at the Iris works in Porvoo, taught applied art in Helsinki from 1902, and stayed there for the rest of his life. The portrait never left Ostend for long. The city museum bought it in 1956, and it hangs today in Mu.ZEE, a few streets from the house where it was painted.