Le Salon bourgeois

Before James Ensor filled his canvases with masks and skeletons, he was a young man of 21 painting the rooms of his own family home in Ostend, on the Belgian coast. This is the parlour at 23 Vlaanderenstraat, and the two women are his sister, nicknamed Mimi, and his aunt, each absorbed in her own quiet task at a covered table. What Ensor was really chasing here was light: the hard daylight from the window, then the softer reflected glow picked up by white cloth, blue velvet, marble and gilt. The dark, thickly worked interiors of these early years puzzled the Brussels critics, who wanted brighter Impressionist colour. Within a few years he would leave this hush behind for the carnival crowds that made his name.