The painting has now surfaced because the generation singing in the same family has been preserved. The work ended up in that family through a certain Anna Roose, who had a shop with painting supplies in Ostend. Ensor regularly visited there and sold or donated her the painting. Ensor titled the work ‘Débris’ (debris), which, according to the auction house, demonstrates the bad relationship between the painter and his mother.
It is a work in oil paint, on which the mother is depicted next to a Chinese vase. Behind the mother you can see a painting of a young woman. That painting is not fictional, it hung in the Salon of Ensor’s parents at the time and can still be admired in the James Ensorhuis in Ostend.