Entry
This painting shows a young woman sitting on a chair holding a bright-red, open parasol in her left hand, its pole propped against her left shoulder. She is dressed in a long, dark-blue skirt with the toes of her shoes peeking out beneath, and a bright red jacket. All that is visible of the white blouse she is wearing under her jacket are the white collar and cuffs. This same female model is shown wearing the same clothes in a study for The Bourgeois Salon of 1880 (Galerie Ronny Van De Velde, Antwerp). There appears to be another article of clothing draped over the back of the chair. The chair seems to be a simple dining chair placed on top of a plain, rectangular wooden box. This same box appears elsewhere in various figure studies made in the studio by Ensor and Willy Finch. A large charcoal and black chalk drawing from a private collection shows the same model in profile in exactly the same costume and pose. In this case, the artist – who may have been either Ensor or Willy Finch – was seated a little further to the left. The wooden box upon which the chair is placed is easier to make out in the drawing than in the painting. In the drawing, the young woman is shown with a bonnet on her head. It is clear to the naked eye that this white bonnet was overpainted in the painting. This observation was confirmed by the x-ray images made for research purposes.
The young woman is Ensor’s younger sister Marie or Mitche (1861-1945) who frequently posed for her brother in the years 1880-85. We can find her distinctive mouth and the long bangs on her forehead in The Lady with Fan (1880), The Colourist (1881), The Oyster Eater (1882) and the lost painting, Haunted Furniture (1885 and 1888/90).
Dorine Cardijn posited that the artist painted the woman outdoors, but the background and foreground are represented so loosely that it is impossible to determine whether the young woman is shown indoors or out.
In 1892, Ensor’s close friend, Eugène Demolder, commented upon a series of coquettes in Ensor’s work. This painting belongs to this series of young, and occasionally older, bourgeois women in various situations.
The style of the painting is sketchy and the fore- and background are particularly loosely painted. The hands and white collar and cuffs of the blouse are also depicted in a very sketchy way. Here and there, the use of a palette knife also strikes the eye. This painting has a very different look to that of Girl with the Upturned Nose (1879), but the differences are less pronounced if we compare the faces in these two paintings. Ensor accentuated certain facial features in Lady with Red Parasol with a few fine, black brushstrokes. The entire composition is dominated by the bright red of the jacket and the more or less bright red area of the open parasol. The young woman's face stands out against this large, irregular red surface. Ensor must have painted over the white bonnet on her head so as not to disrupt this image.
Ensor dated this painting 1881 in the handwritten Liste de mes Oeuvres
(List of my works
) that he sent to Verhaeren in 1908 and Le Roy in 1922, the same year as Study for a Bourgeois Salon. Haesaerts dated the painting 1882. The technical study of the painting revealed that Ensor added his signature and the date to a dry paint layer. However, we do not know when he did this. It is not possible to date the work with greater precision on the basis of stylistic or technical observations. In the Liste de mes oeuvres
, Ensor calls the painting Lady in Red, reminiscent of the titles that James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) gave to his works. Was Ensor already aware of his innovatory role as early as 1880-82, or did he feel a need to emphasise this in any way possible after 1900?
Technical research has revealed a composition beneath the Lady with Red Parasol. The composition was partially reconstructed and shows a scene from the American War of Independence (1775-83). A medal honouring revolutionary war hero, General Daniel Morgan, had been reproduced in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and copied by Ensor in a sketchbook. We do not know whether Ensor later worked up this black-and-white drawing into an oil painting on his own initiative, or whether he did this as a studio exercise at the Brussels art academy.
Ensor first exhibited Lady with Red Parasol at Le Sillon in Brussels. Fellow artist, Adolphe Crespin (1859-1944), probably acquired it shortly thereafter. Crespin was a poster artist and a master of Art Nouveau sgraffito on the facades numerous Brussels bourgeois houses.
