Visser uit Oostende met mand 1900

This is James Ensor’s etching "Fisherman from Ostend with Basket." As an artist living in the Belgian coastal town of Ostend during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ensor was deeply influenced by the everyday lives of its working class. During this period, Ostend was a society sharply divided by economic disparities between the wealthy tourists and the local fishermen. Ensor seeks to explore the identities of the local population of Ostend through the figure of a working fisherman. The fisherman is hunched over, burdened by the weight of his daily catch and the harsh realities of his labor. Ensor makes visible the social and economic hardships of the working class while imbuing the fisherman with dignity and respect, and challenges the viewer to consider the human cost of economic disparity. In many ways, Ensor’s decision to depict the working class reflected the values and socialist politics of the time and can be seen as an endeavor to represent the unvarnished truth of working-class life.