The Parasol

In 1880 James Ensor was 20, recently back in Ostend after three years at the art academy in Brussels, and painting the plain things around the family home. This is one of them, a parasol, worked small and quickly on a piece of cardboard rather than canvas. The colours are muted and the touch is loose, still close to the sober Belgian realism of the day. Nothing in it points to the direction he would take within a few years, when he began crowding his pictures with carnival masks, skeletons and jeering faces. He painted almost all of that later work in an attic studio above his parents' souvenir shop in Ostend, where he lived and worked for most of his life.