James Ensor
Early Life in Ostend
Les bains à Ostende, 1890
Pays-Bas, Fondation Challenges
© Fondation Challenges / DR
Early Life in Ostend
James Sidney Edward Ensor was born in 1860 in the town of Ostend, in Belgium. This small fishing village acquired something of a reputation in 1834, when King Leopold I made his summer residence there, and went on to become a very fashionable and lively seaside resort in the following decades.
It was in Ostend that James' father, James Frederic, a cultured Englishman, met his mother, Marie Catherine Haegheman, a local girl from a middle class family that owned a souvenir and curiosity shop. The shop was to provide a livelihood for the Ensor family, and the future painter grew up in this setting of "shells, lace, rare stuffed fish, old books, engravings, weapons, Chinese porcelain, an inextricable jumble of miscellaneous objects" (letter from Ensor to Louis Delattre, 4 August 1898). Throughout the exhibition there are masks, shells, a mermaid, etc., that came from the Ensor shop and family home.
Coquillages et crustacés, 1889
Wupperthal, Von der Heydt Museum
© Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal. Photo Gerd Neumann / DR
This unusual environment had a long-lasting and decisive influence on the painter, as he would later acknowledge: "My childhood was filled with fantastic dreams and visits to my grandmother's shop, with its iridescent glow reflecting from the shells, its sumptuous lace, strange stuffed animals and the dreadful weapons of savages that used to terrify me. [...] This extraordinary environment certainly developed my artistic faculties". As soon as his talent began to reveal itself, the young artist was undoubtedly able to rely on the support of his father, a sensitive, intellectual man.
In search of modernity
Chinoiseries avec éventails, 1880
Bruxelles, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
© MRBAB, Bruxelles / DR
In search of modernity
After training at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels where he had enrolled in 1877, Ensor quickly rejected its teaching and chose to return to his home town of Ostend in 1880. Other than a few trips to London, Holland and Paris, and numerous visits to Brussels, he remained there until he died. After his stay in the Belgian capital, he started to create his own personal world, exploring his environment in many paintings and drawings.
La mangeuse d'huîtres, 1882
Musée Royal des Beaux Arts, Anvers, Belgique
© DR
Ensor produced landscapes, still lifes and portraits, as well as genre scenes featuring his sister, mother and aunt. The Oyster Eater, the high point of his work at that time, brings together these different pictorial genres magnificently. The picture shows his sister Mitche concentrating on eating oysters, with a profusion of flowers, plates and table linen before her. But The Oyster Eater was certainly too bold for the highly conservative milieu at the time, and was rejected at the 1882 Salon in Antwerp.
However, Ensor was not entirely without success in traditional circles as he exhibited a painting at the Brussels Salon in 1881 and two others in Paris in 1882. He then committed himself to the liberalisation of art exhibitions, and fought to become the leader of an artistic school. He was particularly involved in creating the group known as Les XX who quickly came to play a leading role in the avant-garde.
"Light has ennobled me"
La vive et Rayonnante : L'entrée du Christ à Jérusalem, 1885
Gand, Museum voor Schone Kunsten
© DR / DR
"Light has ennobled me"
Brought up on the shores of the North Sea, Ensor was passionate about the effects of light. In a painting like The Oyster Eater, the shimmering liquids in the glasses and the reflections in the mirror already reveal the painter's interest in the power and quality of light. For him it is the opposite of line, which is in itself the "enemy of genius" and "cannot express passion, anxiety, struggle, pain, enthusiasm or poetry, such beautiful and great feelings...".
This interest in light provoked certain critics to try and draw a parallel with French Impressionism. But the artist vehemently rejected this comparison: "I have been mistakenly placed with the Impressionists, those daubers who are so fond of pale colours. I was the first to understand the distortion that light inflicts upon line. Nobody else attached any importance to it; painters just relied on what they saw. The Impressionist movement left me cold. Édouard Manet was no better than the painters of the old school," he declared in 1899.
L'Intense. Le Christ montant au ciel, 1885
Douvres, collection particulière
© DR
Driven by his convictions, he broadened his experiments, according light a unifying and spiritual power. A mystical aspect was added to the modern inspiration of his early subjects. Thus, his landscapes became more distant from reality, becoming images of primitive chaos dominated by a divine spirit.
This quest culminated in the series of drawings, Visions. The Haloes of Christ or the sensitivities of light (1885-1886). Christ's figure alone could express the power that Ensor had discovered in light. For Ensor, light was all-powerful, and could express every mood. Thus, it is 'happy' or 'uncompromising' or 'sad and broken' or 'intense' or even 'radiant'. It fades, increases, struggles with the dark, or triumphs to the point of blinding intensity.
Presented at the Salon des XX in 1887, these enormous drawings did not inspire the enthusiasm that Ensor had hoped for. His submission provoked a mixed response, whereas Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte also exhibited at the Salon des XX, was highly acclaimed.
"The Painter of Masks"
L'entrée du Christ à Bruxelles, 1898
Ostende, Kunstmuseum aan Zee
Collection de Thomas et Lore Firman
© Photo Daniël Kievith / DR
"The Painter of Masks"
Very sensitive to criticism, Ensor appeared hurt, disappointed and despairing after the Salon des XX in 1887 and his confrontation with Seurat's enormous painting. During that same year, he had to cope with the deaths of his father and his grandmother, to whom he was very attached. These events had a profound effect on Ensor and led to a turning point in his career.
From 1887, images of masks and skeletons, already present throughout his work since 1883, became prominent. He even went back to some of his works from the early 1880s to add in these motifs. Masks and skeletons of course recalled the strange atmosphere of the family shop as well as the Carnival tradition of Ostend, but they also had a symbolic meaning. Masks concealed and heightened a reality that the painter found too ugly and too cruel, while skeletons pointed to the vanity and absurdity of the world.
Squelettes se disputant un hareng saur, 1891
Bruxelles, Musées royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique
© MRBAB, Bruxelles / DR
In 1888, Ensor tackled the monumental Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (2,52 x 4,3 m., Los Angeles, The Paul Getty Museum), his response to Seurat's painting and to the detractors of his work. This painting blends all the principles of Ensor's art: light that intensifies the most vivid colours, the desire for modernity that places Christ in 19th century Brussels, a city torn by conflicting political movements, and masks that confuse reality, the very apotheosis of the painter. Ensor gave his own features to Christ entering Brussels, as if sacrificing his life and his peace of mind to painting.
At the same time as working on his programmatic painting, Ensor took his revenge for the attacks directed at him, with a series of virulent panels, engravings and drawings denouncing the injustices of his time as well as expressing his own petty concerns. The viciousness and lack of constraint of these works were unequalled in these final years of the century.
The Self-Portraits
Ensor aux masques, 1899
Komaki, Japon, Menard Art Museum
© Menard Art Museum, Aichi, Japon / DR
The Self-Portraits
"It would be surprising if Ensor, who loved his art above all else, and consequently loved the person who created it, that is, himself, had not reproduced his own image ad infinitum." wrote the poet and critic Émile Verhaeren in 1908 in his monograph on the artist. In fact Ensor painted images of himself throughout his career. In his early paintings, he appeared young, dashing, full of hope and spirit, at times sad but still splendid. Soon, however, he vented his rancour by subjecting his image to a number of metamorphoses. He was a herring, a madman, a skeleton, etc. He identified himself with Christ and then with a humble pickled herring. He caricatured himself, made himself look ridiculous. He was both puppet master and puppet, in comedies and tragedies into which he would invite his detractors in order to settle old scores quite cruelly.
Ensor à l'harmonium, 1933
Komaki, Japon, Menard Art Museum
© Menard Art Museum, Aichi, Japon / DR
Ensor's self-portraits, so varied and different, are a reflection of his entire oeuvre: difficult to decipher, and, on the face of it, incoherent: in their techniques - drawing, engraving, panel, oil on canvas - and in their size - from very small to very large - they reveal Ensor's fiery impatience, as he experimented with different media to move as close as possible to what he wanted to express. As for their different styles - realist, dreamlike, sardonic, caricatural or macabre - they express the changing moods of the artist. However, it was through the self-portrait that Ensor set out to demonstrate 'the unity' of his work. Portraying himself in his studio, surrounded by his masks, his ghosts and his paintings, he classified, organised and ranked his work, as abundant and brilliant as it was disparate. He painted his mythology over a long period of time and prepared his place in the history of painting.