The White Cloud

Gustave Courbet had died in 1877, and in the early 1880s a young painter on the Belgian coast could still take him as the model for how to paint the sea. Courbet built up his waves and heavy skies with the palette knife as much as the brush, and Ensor did the same here in 1884, in Ostend. The knife marks are still visible in the paint. The sea is only a low, dark band, and almost everything above it is weather. The main mass of cloud is a stratocumulus, and over it Ensor brushed thin threads of much higher cloud. When the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp staged a large Ensor exhibition in 2024, it opened with Courbet's The Wave from 1870 and hung this canvas close by. The picture had come to the museum in 1930 as a gift from François Franck, an Antwerp collector and one of Ensor's longtime supporters.