The Oyster Eater

When Ensor finished this in 1882, he was 22 and painting his sister Mitche at a table laid with flowers, wine and a plate of oysters. He sent it to the big triennial Salon in Antwerp, and it was refused. The next year the progressive Brussels group L'Essor turned it down as well. Part of the unease was the subject. A young woman eating oysters alone, oysters then thought of as an aphrodisiac, carried a charge people did not want on a gallery wall. Those refusals helped push Ensor and other young artists to found their own society, Les XX, and it was there, in 1886, that the work was finally shown. He had painted it in the attic studio above the family's souvenir shop in Ostend, where he worked for most of his life.