Il giardino del caffè Tivoli a Ostenda

Ensor was 16 when he painted this, on a piece of cardboard about the size of a sheet of writing paper. He was taking lessons from two local painters in Ostend and had not yet left for the Brussels academy, which took him in 1877. The Tivoli was a cafe with a garden out at Slijkens, by the locks on the canal, far enough from town to make a Sunday excursion worth the walk. Cafes and pleasure gardens all over 19th-century Europe borrowed the name from Tivoli near Rome and its famous gardens and fountains. In Brussels he was set to copying plaster casts, which he detested, and he was back painting the flat country round Ostend within three years.