The Lady with Red Parasol

In 1880 James Ensor was 20 and had just left the academy in Brussels to work from an attic studio in his parents' house on the Belgian coast. This is one of the sober, closely watched interiors he painted then, years before the masks and skeletons that made his name. A young woman sits holding a red parasol, open indoors, its bright color the one loud note against a dark blue skirt and the dim brown of the room. The same model, in the same red jacket and white collar, turns up in a study he made that year for a larger picture of a bourgeois drawing room. The parasol never sees any sun here. Ensor keeps her and it in the low, even light of a shuttered room.