Return from Calvary

In 1877 a 17-year-old from Ostend arrived at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and this small panel dates from that first stretch of training. It is a set exercise in religious narrative, worked up either from a theme the teacher gave out or from an older picture to follow. The moment is the walk back from Golgotha, with Mary sinking against the companions who hold her up as the crowd comes down the hill. Ensor stuck it out for three years, left in 1880, and called the place an establishment for the short-sighted. The subject came back to him anyway. In 1921 he took up this same scene again in a lithograph, part of a series on the life of Christ, and that print belongs to the same Ostend museum as the panel.