Afternoon in Ostend, 1881 (oil on canvas)

Early in his career, James Ensor painted a series of genre scenes that are known collectively as The Bourgeois Salon. Like this Afternoon in Ostend, the paintings typically depict one or two persons in a bourgeois interior. Ensor’s younger sister Mariette frequently appears as a model in his work. In this particular canvas, Mitche, as the artist used to call her, is sitting all dressed up at the table of their parental home. The woman beside her is Catharina Haegheman, their mother. But despite the identity of the models and the familiarity of the setting, the painting is conceived as a fictional narrative.