Willy Finch in the Studio

In 1880 James Ensor, just 20 and back in Ostend after leaving the Brussels Academy, was painting in a studio in his parents' house, and some days he had company. Willy Finch, a young painter who had grown up in the same seaside town and was, like Ensor, of British descent, worked there beside him. Here Ensor catches him on his feet at a table, seen from the side, his white shirtsleeves bright against a dark waistcoat. Ensor worked fast, laying the paint on in heavy patches, pushing it about with a palette knife and scraping parts back so the layer underneath shows through. For a few years the two friends painted so much alike in style and technique that their pictures sit very close, and they portrayed each other again and again, in oil and in pencil. The museum in Ghent, which bought this canvas in 1986, also keeps a pencil portrait of Finch that Ensor drew in 1883.