The Artist's Mother in Death

Ostend had been under German occupation since October 1914, and Ensor, who spent nearly his whole life in that seaside town, sat the war out there. In 1915 his mother died in the family house at 80. He was 55, and within days he had made an oil sketch, this canvas and several drawings of her laid out on the bed. Much of the colour sits not in her but beside her, in the row of medicine bottles, red, blue and green glass catching the light next to a small statue of the Virgin, while her face and hands turn pale and sharp around the cross she holds. On a smaller drawing of the same scene he wrote 'ma mère morte, effets de médicastres', my dead mother, the work of quack doctors. He had been at that subject for years. His canvas The Bad Doctors, a huddle of surgeons rummaging inside a patient, dates from 1892.