点灯人

Ensor gave the academy in Brussels three years and had had enough by 1880. He went home to Ostend, took the attic of his parents' house as a studio, and painted what was around him. This was one of the first canvases he made up there. Its subject is a lamplighter, the man the town paid to walk the streets at dusk with a pole, light the gas lamps one by one, then walk the same round again before dawn to put them out.

Ensor painted him almost in the dark, in browns and greys, laid on thick. He stayed in that sombre register for about five years, before the masks and harsh reds that made his name. The Belgian state bought this canvas in 1895, by which time his newer work was being refused by exhibition juries and mocked in the press. It stands about a metre and a half tall, the scale a painter of his generation would normally keep for a portrait of somebody important.