Vista de Mariakerke

James Ensor spent almost his whole life in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, and just down the coast lay the dune village of Mariakerke, with its small church of Our Lady of the Dunes. He drew it, etched it and painted it for decades. This is the version from 1901. By then the fiercest part of Ensor was behind him. In the 1880s and 1890s he had unsettled Brussels with crowds of masks, skeletons and grotesque carnival faces, work so strange that even the avant-garde circle he belonged to once refused to show his biggest canvas. Here there is none of that. Just the flat polder, the dunes, the wide North Sea light and the little church he kept coming back to, low on the horizon.