Between about 1880 and 1885, Ensor painted fairly ordinary subjects: domestic interiors, portraits of family and friends, still lifes and scenes of quiet company. This body of work only later acquired the name sombre period, a description of its dark, tonal colour rather than its mood^[1]. Ensor worked through these years almost entirely in Ostend, in a studio set up in the attic of his parents' house, a space he kept using until 1917. Painting a companion in conversation, as this work does, fits naturally into that early practice of observing people close to him in ordinary settings, well before carnival masks and skeletal figures replaced human faces in his paintings from the mid-1880s onward^[1].

Ensor's formal training began locally, with two Ostend landscape painters he later dismissed as provincial, before he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1877 to 1880, a school built around the precise technique that had made the Salon painter Jan Verhas successful^[2]. Ensor repudiated this academic training almost as soon as he left it, writing a sharply satirical account of his time there, yet he continued privately copying reproductions of old masters such as Rembrandt, Jan Steen and Honore Daumier, and of contemporaries including Eugene Delacroix and Jules Bastien-Lepage, published in journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts^[2]. Despite his later claims to have worked in near total isolation in Ostend, Ensor kept close ties to Brussels throughout this period and was well versed in the art of his own time^[2].

During his three years at the Brussels Academy, Ensor became friends with the painters Xavier Mellery and Willy Finch, both of whom would remain part of his artistic circle for years afterward, and he made contact through them with a radical literary and political scene in the city^[3]. This network mattered later in his career: when Ensor's exhibiting years through the 1880s turned stormy, including a rejection from the Antwerp Salon in 1882 in the same year his work was accepted at the Paris Salon, it was this Brussels circle that gave him a footing^[3]. He went on to become a founding member of Les XX, the influential group of Belgian avant-garde artists formed from earlier exhibiting societies such as La Chrysalide and L'Essor, though his relationship with the group later grew strained^[3].