Entry
The painting shows a woman on a stone breakwater. She has a large open umbrella or parasol above her head which she carries in her right hand. She is wearing a hat and the way in which she is dressed suggests that she is a lady of the bourgeoisie. We see her from the back, silhouetted against the surface of the sea.
Stone breakwaters were built along the Belgian coast in the late 1800s, as a consequence of the increasing tourism that had taken off from the mid-19th century. These constructions, built perpendicular to the beach, helped prevent erosion of the sandy beaches – true breakwaters had traditionally been built on either side of harbour entrances to moderate the force of the waves.
Ensor also used a similar breakwater as the principal motif in an 1882 marine painting and in The Breakwater of 1878, although the attribution and dating of the latter are uncertain.
Bourgeois women in silhouette are occasionally found elsewhere in Ensor’s oeuvre and there exists a series of watercolours of circa 1880, in which the same figures are depicted time and again. The dozens of copies that Ensor made – including illustrations of fashionable Parisian ladies and gentlemen by Alfred Grévin (1827-1892) – also testify to Ensor's short-lived interest in figures of this type.
In 1892, Ensor’s close friend, Eugène Demolder, commented upon a series of coquettes in Ensor’s work. This description is more accurate than the term salons bourgeois
– popularised by Paul Haesaerts in 1957 – as this series only contains a handful of bourgeois parlours and a much larger number of ladies elsewhere. Apparently, bourgeois women in Belgium did not go out on their own very often at the end of the 19th century.
The muted colours of this painting and the loneliness of the female figure against the infinite space extending before her can be interpreted as somewhat melancholy and dreamy. She is definitely looking out at the sea but does not appear to be looking at anything particular in the distance. It is certainly not a sunny day, but it does not appear to be rainy either. In Ensor’s time, ladies typically used parasols to protect their white
skin from the sun. Therefore, the purpose of the parasol or umbrella in this painting is unclear, although, it is definitely an attribute of ladies at the seaside.
The horizon is located higher than the woman’s umbrella; this suggests a fairly high viewpoint, although the lightly shadowed underside of the umbrella or parasol is also shown to us. Ensor made this figure more prominent by partially framing it with the parasol. The idea of a figure – more often a man than a woman – gazing out at the vastness of the sea stems from romanticism and creates the image of someone contemplating their destiny. But the significance of this seems secondary to the primarily pictorial concerns of this work.
The image is very much a study in colour in which Ensor seeks the right tones to represent the sky, the sea, the breakwater and the woman’s clothing. The dark projection of the breakwater cuts diagonally into the bright, nuanced area. The painting is proof of Ensor’s subtle powers of observation and his talents as a colourist. It is also proof of his technical skill: he conjures up the lady and suggests the structure and material of the stone construction with minimal brushstrokes, while creating refined shades of colour with his palette knife.
The painting may look like a spontaneous sketch but thorough technical research has revealed that Ensor added paint over already dry paint layers in some places. His relatively open painting style makes it possible to distinguish other, darker spots of colour beneath the surface. It is difficult to ascertain whether these are part of an older, unfinished composition that he painted over.
The painting only left Ensor’s studio after 1908, first entering the Wagemans Collection in Brussels before being acquired by the Swiss lawyer-collector Fritz Trüssel (1873-1965), chair of the Bernese Artists’ Society, whose collection also contained Ensor's The Love Garden of 1891 and a large collection of coloured etchings and with whom Ensor corresponded about the purchase of other pieces.
