Woman with Blue Shawl

In 1881 Ensor was 21 and back in his family's house in Ostend after leaving the art academy in Brussels. He was painting quiet, dim interiors and the people in them. The masks and crowds he is famous for came later in the decade. Here an old woman sits with her hands folded, a blue shawl around her shoulders, and in the lower left corner he signed and dated it, ENSOR 81. Forty years later, in 1921, a group of members of an Antwerp exhibition society called Kunst van Heden pooled their money to buy a set of his paintings for the museum. Four early realist pictures, this one among them, arrived together with grotesque mask scenes such as The Intrigue of 1890. That gift is the core of what the Antwerp museum describes as the largest Ensor collection anywhere.