The Wait

James Ensor is remembered for carnival masks, skeletons and jeering crowds, the strange, biting work that came later. Around 1880 none of that had surfaced yet. He was about 20, recently back in his native Ostend after art school in Brussels, working in the dark, muted browns of what is called his sombre period. 'The Wait' belongs to those early years, its title naming a plain human situation rather than any drama. It is a study, not a finished exhibition piece, from the quiet phase before Ensor turned to the masks and grotesques that made his name. The painting reached the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp through the collection of Emma Lambotte and her husband Albin, an Antwerp surgeon, both early champions of his work. The museum now holds the largest group of Ensor paintings anywhere, and this small early study sits among them.