La dama in pena

Ensor was 22 when he painted this, working in his parents' house in Ostend, above the shop where his mother sold seashells, souvenirs and carnival masks to summer visitors. 1882 was also the year the Antwerp Salon refused his Oyster Eater for being too raw, and a Brussels artists' society turned the same canvas down after that. He could not show it in public until 1886. The pictures he made at home in those years are closed rooms, heavy hangings and thin daylight, and this one puts a woman on a bed in a shuttered bedroom. He painted them in the smothered browns and greys that Belgian painting had settled into by then. The masks that made him famous were still a few years off, and they came from the shop downstairs.