James Ensor

Biography

The canvas “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889” did not fit in the studio. The ceiling in the attic was low, so Ensor nailed the canvas to the wall while its lower part lay on the floor; he had to work on it sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing on a chair. The picture measures about 2.6 by 4.3 metres. He had a house painter prepare the paint in jars of five and ten kilograms and laid it on undiluted, in broad layers.

He was born on 13 April 1860 in Ostend, and he died there too. His father, James Frederic Ensor, came from an English family and was an educated man, but things did not go well for him in Belgium, and in town he was regarded as a failure. His mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, ran a souvenir shop together with her sister: seashells, trinkets, carnival masks and costumes. From that shop masks, skeletons and skulls passed into his paintings. The family lived on the corner of the rue de Flandre and the Van Iseghemlaan.

He studied with the local painters Edouard Dubar and Michel Van Cuyck, and then at the Ostend academy. In 1877 he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he made friends with Fernand Khnopff and Willy Finch, and he left it in 1880, calling it an “institution for the half-blind”. Those three years remained his only long period away from Ostend. On his return he set up a studio in the attic of his parents’ house and worked there until 1917. Of his travels, a few short trips to France and the Netherlands in the 1880s are known, and a four-day trip to London in 1892.

His first works are dark and realistic: “Russian Music” (1881) and “The Drunkards” (1883). He began to exhibit in 1881, with the avant-garde group La Chrysalide in Brussels. “The Oyster Eater”, a portrait of his sister Mariette, was rejected in Antwerp in 1882, and then by the group L’Essor. In 1883 Ensor joined Les XX (the “Society of Twenty”, a Brussels association of progressive artists), and in the same year came “The Scandalized Masks”, his first painting with masks. From then on his palette grew lighter and his subjects ever more bizarre.

His most productive time came at the end of the 1880s. In 1888 he made forty-five etchings; over his lifetime he made 133, counting drypoints. He turned to religious subjects, above all the torments of Christ; he was an atheist himself and saw in Christ a victim of mockery. In the large canvas of 1888–1889 a crowd in grotesque masks advances on the viewer, while Christ on his donkey is almost lost in it. Among the crowd one can recognise Belgian politicians, historical figures and members of the artist’s family. Les XX rejected the painting, and the question of his expulsion from the group was already raised at that time. In 1893 Octave Maus dissolved the group, and Ensor protested against it. The canvas was rolled up and lay for many years; it could be stretched out only in 1917.

From 1887 there is an etching, “Le Pisseur”: the artist urinates against a wall scrawled with the words “Ensor is a madman”. To my mind, it is his most exact answer to the critics.

Recognition came slowly. In 1895 the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels bought “The Lamp Boy” (1880), and his first solo exhibition was held in Brussels. By 1920 major exhibitions were being devoted to him. In 1929 King Albert made him a baron, and in the same year the first large retrospective was held in Brussels, where “Christ’s Entry” was shown as well. In 1933 he received the Légion d’honneur. The best works are held to be those of 1885–1891, and later, in the judgement of many historians, he often repeated himself.

From the beginning of the twentieth century he painted less and less and turned more to music. He had no musical training, but he improvised on the harmonium and willingly played for visitors. In 1907 he composed a ballet-pantomime, “The Scale of Love”, with his own libretto, sets and costumes. Later, as is known, he said that he had taken the wrong path and should have devoted himself to music.

During the Second World War he stayed in Ostend, despite his friends’ advice and the danger of bombing. His daily walks made the old baron a familiar figure in the town. He died in Ostend on 19 November 1949, at the age of 89.