Bathing Hut on the Beach

object number:

2972

measurements:

17,5 × 22,5 cm

date:

1876 - 1876

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Leopold de Waelplaats 1, 2000 Antwerpen

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Entry

The bathing hut stands out against the darker surface of the sea, casting a dark shadow on the beach. The hut’s window is partly open and it appears as if we see the sea through the open window. The hut is marked with the number 164. We can distinguish two plumes of smoke on the horizon from two steamships. More than half of the painting consists of the cloudy sky over the sea.

Mobile beach huts, in which bathers could change and then be pulled down into the sea by horses, became increasingly widespread in the 19th century along the French, Belgian, Dutch and German coasts. Bathing huts were in use in Ostend as early as the 1830s. The huts were indeed numbered. Steamships also began to sail on the North Sea from the 1820s.¹

Technical research on the painting has revealed grains of sand in the paint layer, indicating that this work was painted in situ, at the beach, en plein air. Curiously, the vanishing point of the bathing hut is located beneath the horizon line. It is likely that Ensor drew the bathing hut in pencil from a lower standpoint and only then placed the horizon line and painted the work in oil. The sixteen-year-old Ensor also seems to have struggled to depict the three-dimensional aspect of the wheels convincingly. The entire painting is primarily an exercise in finding the right shades of green-grey and blue-grey tones: a typical 19th-century study en plein air.

Ensor wrote a chronological overview of his paintings, drawings and etchings for the monograph on him published by Emile Verhaeren in 1908. Ensor updated La liste de mes oeuvres (The list of my works) for a new book on his work published by Grégoire Le Roy in 1922. He added a short note to the first page of his manuscript which reads as follows: From 1875 to 1877, marine paintings and landscapes around Ostend. 1878, Compositions. Biblical scenes.² The earliest of Ensor’s known works were only discovered after his death. One of them was found in the collection of French lawyer Albert Croquez (1886-1949). On the back of this little work, Ensor wrote: A mon ami Croquez (…) Un de mes premiers essais en 1873 (To my friend Croquez [...] One of my first attempts in 1873). Some thirty early works of this sort are known to us. Their authenticity rests on their provenance. This is not the case of the dozens of nature studies known as the cartons roses, painted on rectangular pieces of pink cardboard with their front sides covered in a white preparatory layer. In Ma vie en abrégé of 1934, Ensor recounts that he painted views of nature around Ostend at the age of fifteen. Ces petites oeuvres sans prétention, peintes au pétrole sur carton rose me charment encore (I am still charmed by these small, unpretentious works painted in petrol on pink cardboard).³ During the 1920s, Ensor painted larger copies of four of these nature studies on canvas. He chose a few examples from the cartons roses series to exhibit at the large retrospective of his works at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 1929.⁴

Twenty-six of these cartons roses have been identified to date. They are all painted with the same sort of standard painters’ materials. It is intriguing, but highly unlikely, that Ensor used petrol for these works, despite his claims to have done so. Petrol was sometimes used for cleaning painting supplies or thinning oil paint.

Ensor mostly used painter's cardboard measuring 18 cm by 24 cm. For many years, Ensor’s biographers claimed that Ensor had used packaging materials from his parents' souvenir shop for these nature studies.⁵

Ensor wrote the date on the back of these studies. The first known study from this series bears the following inscription on its back: D’après nature / Dunes et mer calme / 5 avril / 1876 / matin (From nature / Dunes and calm sea / 5 April / 1876 / morning). Not all of these studies are dated precisely but they were often numbered. The logic behind the numbering for the complete series is unclear, but on the basis of the numbering, we know that the whole series comprised some forty pieces painted over the course of the spring, summer and autumn of 1876. The dates are not always reliable either. The back of the bathing hut painting is inscribed: Dimanche 29 juillet 1876 / Voiture baignore / n° 22 n° 23 / Après-midi (Sunday 29 July 1876 / Bathing hut / n° 22 n° 23 / Afternoon). But in 1876, 29 July did not fall on a Sunday, but on a Saturday. We do not know whether Ensor sometimes made mistakes or only added the inscriptions at a later date.⁶

Nor do we know how the sixteen-year-old Ensor got the idea of painting one to two mornings or afternoons a week over a six-month period, by the sea, in the dunes or on the polders in the area around Ostend. However, during those years, the coast was the Belgian avant-garde’s preferred place to work. Perhaps the young Ensor had seen his older colleagues, such as Louis Dubois (1830-1880), Louis Artan (1837-1890) or Félicien Rops (1833-1898), at work and tried to imitate their ideas and habits in this overconfident series of dozens of nature studies.⁷

Robert Hoozee was of the opinion that some of these cartons roses remained scholastic and hesitantly painted, but nonetheless he believed that studies such as Bathing Hut on the Beach testified to Ensor's sharp powers of observation and great sensitivity to light.⁸

The composition appeals to the imagination. Diane Lesko perceives a mood of quiet mystery that imbues the painting with the suggestion of autobiographical content. The bathing hut is like a shell hiding a silent inhabitant who shies away from exposing himself to danger and thus, according to Lesko, represents Ensor's own anxious solitude.⁹