Joke, resident:
Things are heating up in the bathing cart on the left. In the rest of The Baths at Ostend too, there is kissing and vigorous writhing in the waves. Bathing cart number 22 is literally a brothel. We shouldn’t gossip, but what about Ensor and love?
First, the facts. He died unmarried and childless. For most of his life, he lived on and off with his mother, his sister and his aunt. His most intense friendships and correspondence were with women. Mariette Hannon, Emma Lambotte, Augusta Boogaerts: all women who figure in his portraits and whom he certainly loved. But did it ever develop into carnal love? Psychoanalysts have discussed it endlessly, but there’s only one thing we know for sure: we simply don’t know.
It seems that Ensor mainly viewed the act of love from the outside. He knew the role played by sexual impulses but didn’t act on them. L’amour, c’est les autres. (Love is other people.) He looked through the keyhole, a bit like the peeping Tom at the bathing cart in The Baths at Ostend. It makes him blush, but that’s as far as it goes.
And just one piece of gossip: in 1913, Ensor went out on the town with Rik Wouters and a few other artists to an Antwerp brothel after a vernissage. A witness wrote that Ensor remained seated in his baggy black cloak and looked on ‘with eager eyes’. And his hands? They remained firmly on the handle of his umbrella.