Return of the prodigal son

James Ensor painted this in 1877, when he was 17, the year he began at the art academy in Brussels. It is a small canvas, barely a foot and a half across, and it takes up one of the oldest subjects in Western art: the prodigal son of the parable coming home to his father. There is nothing strange in it yet. The painter who would later crowd his pictures with carnival masks, skeletons and jeering faces is here doing the careful, traditional work expected of a beginner. Ensor spent almost his entire life in the seaside town of Ostend, and the painting hangs there today, a short walk from where he lived.