Sloops

By 1890 Ensor was the most quarrelled-over painter in Belgium. His enormous Christ's Entry into Brussels had been refused even by Les XX, the avant-garde group he himself belonged to, and in 1889 the members voted on whether to expel him. He survived by one vote. Through those same years he kept walking down to the harbour channel at Ostend, where he had been etching the fishing boats since 1887, and painted the sloops for what the light did to wet hulls and rigging. No masks, no crowd, no scandal. The canvas later hung in the Antwerp house of his friends Albin Lambotte, a surgeon, and his wife Emma, who had built a large Ensor collection. Money got tight, they offered it to the city, and the museum took six paintings in 1927, this one among them.