The Sombre Lady

Most people who know James Ensor picture the later work: leering carnival masks, skeletons, sour bright colour. This dark, hushed canvas comes from before all that. In 1881 Ensor was barely 21, recently out of the Brussels academy and painting in the family house in Ostend, where his mother kept a shop of shells and curiosities for tourists. Like his other pictures of these years, it holds to a narrow range of browns and blacks, the somber palette then admired in advanced Belgian painting. Within a few years his colours would brighten and the masks would arrive, and he would spend the rest of a long life as the painter of Ostend. This early canvas, still in its quiet browns, now hangs in Brussels among the art of the century's close.