ENSOR, James (Ostend, 1860 – Ostende, 1949)
The son of an English father and a Flemish mother, Ensor was born and brought up in the Belgian town of Ostend. His family owned a souvenir shop, where they sold Chinese porcelain, fans, seashells, carnival masks and other decorative objects that appear frequently in his paintings.
In 1877 the young Ensor enrolled at the Brussels Academy, where he spent three years. In his initial phase, his works include interior scenes and landscapes painted in a realistic style, sombre and with heavily applied medium. Towards 1885, under the influence of Turner and the Impressionists, his palette becomes brighter. In this period, his works show an abundance of masks, skeletons and other grotesque and macabre elements, linked to the Flemish tradition of Bosch and Bruegel. A ferociously satirical vein runs through Ensor’s engravings and paintings, occasionally reaching a visionary intensity as, for example, in his masterpiece The Entrance of Christ in Brussels (1888).
It is usually said that Ensor’s creative impulse declined, both in quantity and in quality, from 1900 onward. From that date, the artist preferred elaborating, rather than original compositions, new versions of his previous works, and his fantasies became gentler, less caustic. In any case, it was in this long, later period that the fame of the artist grew and became established. A monographic work about Ensor’s life and art, written by the poet and critic Emile Verhaeren, is published in 1908, and an important retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Rotterdamsche Kunstring in 1910. By then, Ensor had earned the admiration of the German expressionists; proof of this is that he was included in the exhibition Der Sturm held in 1912, as well as the fact that Emil Nolde and Erick Heckel visited him in Ostend. Official acknowledgement and popular acclaim finally came for Ensor in the decade of the 1920s, with a series of exhibitions in the most important European capitals, culminating in 1929 with the important retrospective exhibition of his work at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, when the Belgian king granted him the title of baron and his native town erected a monument in his honour.
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