Ensor, James

Ensor, James (1860–1949). Belgian painter and etcher (his father was English and he had British nationality until 1929). One of the most original artists of his time, Ensor had links with Symbolism, was a major influence on Expressionism, and was claimed by the Surrealists as a forerunner, but his work defies classification within any school or group. He was born in Ostend, where his parents kept a souvenir shop, and apart from a period studying at the Academy in Brussels, 1877–80, and a few brief trips abroad, he rarely left his home town. His early works were mainly bourgeois interiors painted in a thick and vigorous technique. When several were rejected by the Salon in Brussels in 1883, Ensor joined the progressive group Les Vingt (see LIBRE ESTHÉTIQUE). From about this time his subject-matter changed and he began to introduce the fantastic and macabre elements that are chiefly associated with his name: ‘Reason is the enemy of art', he said. ‘Artists dominated by reason lose all feeling, powerful instinct is enfeebled, inspiration becomes impoverished and the heart lacks its rapture.’ He made much use of carnival masks, grotesque figures, and skeletons, his bizarre and monstrous imaginings recalling the work of his Netherlandish forebears Bosch and Bruegel. The interest in masks probably originated in his parents' shop, but he was also one of the first European artists who appreciated African art, in which they play such a great part. Through his ‘suffering, scandalized, insolent, cruel, and malicious masks', as he called them, he portrayed life as a kind of hideous carnival. Often his work had a didactic or satirical flavour involving social and religious criticism; his most famous work, the huge Entry of Christ into Brussels (Getty Museum, Malibu, 1888), shows how he imagined Christ might be greeted on a new Palm Sunday. It provoked such an outburst of criticism among his associates in Les Vingt (who refused it for exhibition) that he was almost expelled from the group.

Although Ensor continued to exhibit with the Les Vingt and later with La Libre Esthétique, from this time he became something of a recluse and his work become even more misanthropic. Nevertheless, from about the turn of the century his reputation grew rapidly. In 1899, for example, the Paris journal La Plume devoted a special issue to him and organized an exhibition of his work; in 1903 he was made a Knight of the Order of Leopold; in 1905 he was given a large one-man exhibition at L’ Art Contemporain in Antwerp; and in 1908 there appeared the first major monograph on him (by the poet Émile Verhaeren). The culmination of his career came in 1929, when the inaugural exhibition of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels was devoted to his work (The Entry of Christ into Brussels was shown in public for the first time) and he was created a baron by King Albert. His work changed little after about 1900, however, and he was content to repeat his favourite themes. From 1904 he also gave up printmaking (he was one of the greatest etchers of his time and also made some lithographs). There is a museum of his work in Ostend.