Theo Hannon

Around 1880 the poet Théo Hannon did the young James Ensor a favour that shaped his next decade. He brought him into the Brussels house of his sister Mariette and her husband Ernest Rousseau, a professor at the Free University, where scientists, writers and painters gathered. Hannon was nine years older than Ensor and already had a name. His book of poems, Rimes de joie, had come out in 1881 with a preface by the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and etchings by Félicien Rops. Ensor paints him seated in profile, in a grey suit, a pince-nez on his nose, in the dark, heavy paint of his early realist years. The inscription ENSOR 82 is in the lower right corner. The portrait came to Antwerp in 1921, when members of a local exhibition society, L'Art contemporain, paid for a group of Ensor's early pictures and gave them to the museum.