Seashells

Ensor grew up above a souvenir shop on the Ostend seafront, where his mother and aunt sold shells, lace, stuffed fish and carnival masks to summer visitors. He painted that stock for 60 years. This still life is from 1936, when he was 76 and had been a baron for seven years by the king's decree, an honoured national figure whose radical work lay half a century behind him. His late years went largely into repeating and reworking earlier subjects, and shells had been turning up in his still lifes since the 1880s. Ostend itself had been shelled and occupied in the First World War and rebuilt as a resort around him. He stayed in the town until his death in 1949.