The Rooftops of Ostend

Most people know Ensor for skeletons and carnival masks, the grotesque crowds he would paint a few years after this. In 1884 he was 24 and had barely left Ostend, the Belgian seaside town where he was born, and this is simply the view from the attic studio in his parents' house on the corner of the Boulevard Van Iseghem. Chimneys, gables, a pale sky doing very little. He painted this same stretch of rooftops three times across his life, always from the same window. The brushwork is already restless, the paint scraped and dragged more than described, which is the part of him that would soon turn strange. For now it is just a young man looking out over the roofs he grew up under.