James Ensor

gigatos | May 31, 2022

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Summary

James Sidney Edouard baron Ensor (Ostend, April 13, 1860 – there, November 19, 1949) was a Belgian painter of symbolism. He is generally recognized as the most important innovator of modern art in Belgium, a deviant individualist who was not easily subsumed into one art direction or another. He was also a composer and writer.

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Family

Ensor”s father, James Frederic Ensor, had British parents. Ensor”s mother was Marie Louise Cathérine Haegheman of Ostend, a woman of simple origins, the daughter of lace store owners who could neither read nor write.

The family moved in 1876 to a new building on the corner of the Van Iseghemlaan and the Vlaanderenstraat in Ostend. His mother, together with her sister Mimi, operated a store selling souvenirs, shells, chinoiserie and carnival items such as masks and comic costumes. These items would later act on Ensor”s imagination, and the masks often appeared in his works later. Some floors were operated as rooms for tourists. James was able to set up a small studio on the mansard room. From here he had a good view of the streets and the roofs of the Van Iseghemlaan and the Vlaanderenstraat. This theme will recur frequently in many of his works. This studio was also used for some time by his friend Willy Finch.

Although he was born in Ostend, James Frederic was enrolled in Brighton, the son of James Rainford and of Anne Andrew, his English grandparents. These English grandparents were rentiers from Sussex. Ensor”s father, an engineer of Bridges and Roads, left for the United States shortly after the birth of little James, hoping to make a fortune there. It was a failure and he returned penniless. Ensor said of his father that he was a wise and superior man, an intellectual who spoke several languages. He subscribed to art magazines, which may have influenced his son. However, he could not cope with the failure and, under the guise of a sober and authoritarian Ostend merchant”s wife, on whom he was financially dependent, he began to drink and became the shame of the family. He was laughed at as an Ostend drunk and once came home, half shaved bald with half a mustache left. He died, the day after he was brought home in a drunken state by the police, when Ensor was 27 and at the height of his creative period. James Ensor would never forgive this social class, which had ostracized his father, and continued to despise it in his paintings.

Ensor had a sister Mariëtte, usually called Mietje (himself he called her Mitche), who was one year younger than he. She would become one of his favorite models. She married a Chinese merchant when Ensor was 32. It did not become a successful marriage. She left her husband after a few months, but did have a child with him, a girl who became the darling nursing niece Alex and whom Ensor called “La Chinoise.” She would later marry at age fifteen.

Private life

James Ensor himself was never married. He concealed or mystified his private life as much as possible. As an academy student in Brussels, he came to be impressed by Mariëtte Rousseau, wife of Ernest Rousseau and older sister of his friend Théo Hannon. He depicted her numerous times. However, later he had a chosen girlfriend: Augusta Bogaerts (1870-1951), the “Siren”, whom he painted in the famous double portrait of 1905, when she was 35. This daughter of an Ostend hotel owner was 10 years younger than Ensor, who first met her when he was 28. In 1904 he became acquainted with Emma Lambotte of Liège, an intelligent married woman. He called her his good fairy” and corresponded busily with her. Through this woman he came into contact with François Franck, the inspirer of the Antwerp art circle “Kunst van Heden” (and the later founder of the Ensor collection in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp). In 1914 he gave painting lessons to Alice Frey, who had fled to Ostend due to war circumstances and happened to live next door to him. She could thus call herself “the only pupil” of James Ensor

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Training

In 1873, the young Ensor attended school at the Ostend Onze-Lieve-Vrouwecollege. He turned out to be a disciplined student there, but he already showed a great fondness for drawing. The archives of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwecollege contain a booklet “Le petit sécrétaire” with on the title page “A rider on horseback”, drawn by the young Ensor. He showed his first drawings and paintings, when he was barely 14, to the then famous master Louis Dubois, who encouraged him. Ensor remained at this school for only two years. He then took painting and drawing lessons from two Ostend painters Edouard Dubar (a marine painter who became a photographer and published lithographs) and Michel Van Cuyck (an oil painter, watercolorist and lithographer). Again, he showed rebellion and did not have a high opinion of their “deceptive sponge and drawing technique, of their dull, bored and stillborn métier.”

In 1876 he took drawing lessons from the antique and from the live model at the Ostend Academy of Fine Arts. From that period date his first paintings of the sea, the beach and dune and polder landscapes, such as “Dunes” (around 1876), “View of Mariakerke” (1876), “Fort Napoleon” (1876), “The triumphal carriage” (1877), “The bathing coach on the beach” (1877).

Ensor was 17 years old when he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels on October 8, 1877. It was the only time he left Ostend for an extended period. He stayed away for three years. He rented a small room in the Sint-Jansstraat, near the Grote Markt. His teachers Joseph Stallaert, Joseph van Severdonck and Alexandre Robert gave him courses in painting and drawing after the classical model. But he got into trouble with his teachers again. He became acquainted with some fellow pupils: Willy Finch, Paul Dubois, Fernand Khnopff, Willy Schlobach, Guillaume Van Strydonck, Rudolph Wystman and Dario de Regoyos.

During this period Ensor drew a number of folk figures from his surroundings in Ostend, not so much for social reasons, but to further develop his drawing talent. From this time also dates “Breakwater at Ostend” (1878), “Naked boy” (1878), “Polder landscape” (1878), “Man with the wounded arm” (early 1879), “Self-portrait” (1879), “The girl with the seesaw nose” (1879), “Ensor in front of the easel” (1879) and the dark charcoal drawing “Female nude” (1879) (also referred to as “La Bohémienne”).

When Ensor was 20 years old, in 1880, he left the academy and with it immediately Brussels. The results of his training had not been so brilliant. He received only a seventh prize for drawing after the classical model and a tenth prize for painting after nature. It made him an angry and embittered man and he would portray this mood in sarcastic and satirical scenes. He returned to Ostend, staying with his parents at the corner of the Vlaanderenhelling and the Van Iseghemlaan. To escape his bossy mother, he retreated to the attic and set up his first studio there. From the large attic window he had a bird”s eye view of the sea (with its endless shades of light and color, depicted in different navies), of streets, buildings and passersby. This view would therefore be reflected in many works. He continued to live here until 1917 and he produced his best paintings here as well.

In the same year 1880, he painted his widely known “The Boy with the Lamp” in predominantly black and ochre, and his works “Grey Sea”, “Still Life with Duck”, “The Marsh”. He continued to be productive and in 1881 painted his “Flanders Street in the Snow”, “Portrait of my Father”, “The Gloomy Lady”, “Afternoon at Ostend” “The Clouded Chamberlain” and “Woman with the Blue Scarf”. This was his “dark period” interpreted in his bourgeois interiors where he depicted the atmosphere of rigidity and boredom with a dark impressionistic brushwork. He painted most of his navies in the period 1880-1885. Like his drawings, he painted his navies as a convinced plein airist. His 1885 impressionist painting “Large Navy – Sunset” is one of his larger canvases.

Les vingt

Supported in his talent by the Brussels avant-garde, Ensor sent three paintings (The Colorist, The Citizens” Salon and Nature morte) to the progressive salon Chrysalide in 1881 and the painting “The Russian Music” to the Exposition Générale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1882. The painting “The Citizens” Salon” depicted the stifling atmosphere of his own domestic environment. The painting “Russian Music” refers to the Russian chamber music that had recently been discovered in Belgium at the time. Ensor later regularly referred to the theme of music in his works (“Portrait of Dario de Regoyos” (1884), “Music in the Rue de Flanders” (1891), “Au conservatoire” (1902) or by inserting musicians or himself as a musician).

He painted his “Portrait of My Mother,” “The Oyster Eater” and “The Lady in Distress” in 1882.

From 1882, Ensor began to belong to the art circle L”Essor. He participated in the sixth (1882) and seventh (1883) exhibitions of this group. Also in 1885 he was on the salon of L”Essor.

Ensor”s work was rejected several times, including by L”Essor. Most of his paintings were viewed with displeasure or labeled as more curious than beautiful with the craziest representations on them. His entire submission to the Salon des Beaux-Arts of Antwerp was rejected. He felt misunderstood, “masked” as it were. That submission included “Afternoon in Ostend” (1881) and “The Oyster Eater” (1882), two works that would later be counted among his masterpieces. With “The Oyster Eater” Ensor distanced himself from the dark atmosphere of his previous paintings. He painted his sister in a bright world of color and light. The rejection by the salon and by art criticism meant a great disappointment for him. He decided to distance himself from objective reality and to go his own way from then on. “The Oyster Eater” was purchased 20 years later by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, at the Triennial Salon of 1904.

He exhibited at the Kursaal of Ostend in 1882 and 1883, at the 32nd Triennial of Ghent (1883) and at the salon of the Société Royale des Aquarellistes Belges (1883).

He painted the desolate existence of “The Drunkards” in 1883 and the colorful canvas “Roofs in Ostend” in 1884, whose tempestuous sky is somewhat reminiscent of William Turner”s “The Last Voyage of the Warship Téméraire.” In 1887, Ensor, along with Guillaume Vogels, traveled to London to learn more about Turner”s work.

Meanwhile, the Brussels lawyer Octave Maus emerged as an enthusiastic organizer, patron, spokesman, and inspirer of a revolving new group of artists, Les XX. This group, founded in October 1883, grew into a remarkable group of innovators in the Belgian art world. He joined this Brussels-based progessive artist grouping and became a founding member. Any painter with a bit of a name or on his way to fame would exhibit at the salons of Les XX. Both Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat had their first breakthrough in Brussels.

Ensor exhibited at the first exhibition of Les XX in 1884 with six works. He received a rather disparaging critique, including a first article in L”Art Moderne (a magazine led by Octave Maus). But his submission to the official Salon of Brussels was again refused. He sent twenty works to the 1886 Les XX Salon, but the criticism discussed only his technique and not the art value of his works.

He denounced this criticism to the hilt in his work “The Calvary” with himself on the cross, as a victim of so much misunderstanding, and the critic as a Roman soldier piercing his side.

He was honored, on the occasion of his appointment as a Knight in the Order of Leopold, in 1904 by his friends of the “Cercle Cecilia” , organizers of the carnival party “Bal du Rat mort” at the Ostend Kursaal. The festive magazine, printed in an edition of only 40 issues and edited by Géo Daveluy, was illustrated by Ensor himself . It contains, in addition to a photograph of Ensor, texts in which he denounces some friends in a carnivalesque manner, followed by a red reproduction of “Devils who taunt me” and some playful chants.

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Draughtsman and etcher

At age 25, Ensor developed intestinal problems which led to chronic concerns about his health. His first drawings of the series “Aureoles of Christ” or “The sensibilities of Light” saw the light (“The adoration of the shepherds”, “Christ is shown to the people”, “Entry into Jerusalem”, “Satan and the fantastic legions torment the Crucified”, “The Descent from the Cross and the Ascension of Christ”). His fears and hallucinations were not understood at Les XX. One spoke of a product of a sick brain. But Emile Verhaeren detected the influence of Rembrandt in those works.

1886 was a turning point in the artistic evolution of Ensor”s “Light.” He distanced himself from his gloomy “interiors”. He made his first etchings in 1886, prompted to do so by Mariette Rousseau.

He reached his peak in 1888 with no fewer than 45 etchings, including “Self-portrait pas fini” (1885) and the masterpiece “The Cathedral” (1886), which made him equally famous. The Cathedral belongs to a series of 133 graphic works. It is among his most famous graphic works and is also one of the first in which he depicts a crowd of people. A version of this work was also sold in 1933, colored with chalk.

His etching “Devils roast the angels and arse angels” (1888), through the use of devils, monsters and masks, captures the atmosphere of works by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

“The Baths of Ostend” is a well-known 1890 work in oil, chalk and colored pencil. He resumed it in 1891 in an ink drawing in India ink on paper and in an etched version. Ensor here playfully and satirically sketches the beau monde and day-trippers on the beach at Ostend on a busy summer day. Because of obvious erotic allusions and the criticism of rank and file, the work was rejected in 1895 (or 1898?) at the Salon of “La Libre Esthétique”. When Ensor complained about this to King Leopold II, Octave Maus even had to give it a place of honor.

With “Christ Calms the Storm” (1891), he hit the bull”s-eye in modernism.

Painting “The Entry of Christ into Brussels”

From 1885, the figure of Christ takes a central place in Ensor”s works. Here he combines the sublime with the grotesque, sometimes conventionally, sometimes humorously.

In 1888, when Ensor was 28, he began work on “The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889.” This would become his most popular painting, but also one of his most difficult works. However, the work was not finished a year later to be exhibited at the Les XX salon.

It had become a monumental work 2.58 meters high and 4.31 meters long. His attic studio was not high enough and he had to nail the canvas to the wall, leaving the lower part on the floor. For such a monumental work, Ensor could not use expensive tubular paint. He asked a house painter to prepare lacquer paint in 5 and 10 kg pots. He then painted the paint undiluted in large strokes, layer by layer, rolling the painting up a little each time.

Ensor used a biblical theme, namely the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, but he transposed the theme to Brussels. Hidden in the scene, Christ (Ensor”s facial features?) sits on a donkey, accompanied by a cheering crowd, a brass band and a motley procession of masks. Thousands of grotesque figures stream forward from the background, with masked characters in front, with whom Ensor is mocking: the haughty judge, grinning soldiers, fishermen”s wives, the smug bourgeoisie, a mocking couple in love, a doctor with a magician”s hat, Death in frak, a couple of musicians from the “Fanfares doctrinaires” and finally, at the very front, a pompous bishop playing tambour-major. On the right are the mayor and his aldermen in clown costume. At the top stretches a banner with the text “Vive la Sociale” (Rise of the Socialist Party). Ensor in fact made the entire crowd look foolish. He located this entry in Brussels because he had experienced so many disappointments there.

The canvas remained rolled up for 29 years in his attic studio, on the corner of the Flanders Ramp. Yet there is a photograph from that period in which we see the work somewhat clumsily nailed against the wall of the studio with numerous other works. He was only able to really mount it in 1917, above his harmonium, when he moved to his new home in Vlaanderenstraat. This house, the current Ensor House, he inherited from his uncle Leopold. When the work was transported to Paris for the Great Exhibition of 1929, a section of the facade balcony first had to be demolished. This happened again for the Brussels exhibition in 1939.

Eugène Demolder was among the small circle of intellectuals who stood up for Ensor and wrote the first monograph on him “Mort Mystique d”un théologien”. In 1892, Demolder wrote: “… The painter Ensor (…) is one of the first in Belgium to be challenged by the modern quest for light. He is an innovator (…) We have seen what variety and suppleness Ensor brings to his paintings …”.

The canvas was slightly damaged by some shrapnel during the Second World War. It then hung in various places: in Venice (1950), at the Casino in Knokke (1971), at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ostend (1977-1978), on loan to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Chicago and New York (1976) and the Kunsthaus in Zurich (1983). It was purchased in 1987 by the Getty Museum in Malibu, Los Angeles where it was skillfully restored. There is also a copy in the Ensor House in Ostend.

This work has assumed mythical proportions in the history of modern art. It anticipated, or even initiated, the expressionism of the twentieth century. However, one finds in this work the influence of earlier masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, William Turner to Georges Seurat.

The thick layers of pigment that push the lilliputian frenzied crowd forward from the background into the masks in the foreground are almost a grotesque parody of the flat spaces in Les XX paintings. This bold painting, an anachronism by the standards of 1889, must have represented a veritable assault on contemporary beauty conventions. The crude ugliness of the subject must not be inferior to the multiplicity of colors in this work, the wanted confusion in the composition and the total abandonment of a perspective from one point. One already has to go far ahead in art history, to the brutal distortions of post 1945, to find something similar as in the works of Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet and the Cobra movement.

Ensor made an etching of this in mirror image on Japanese paper in 1898 (Royal Library AlbertI collection, Brussels).

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The figure of Christ in the works of Ensor

Ensor used the figure of Christ several more times, usually in an allegorical sense, such as “Christ Insulted” (etching, 1886), “The Dying Christ” (1888), “Christ Calms the Storm” (1891), “The Man of Sorrows” (1891) (a distorted self-portrait), “Christ and the Critics” (1891), “The Temptation of Christ” (1913).

Between 1912 and 1920, he drew 31 lithographs “Scenes from the Life of Christ” , reusing several previous drawings. He published them in 1921 in the form of an album in a limited number of numbered and signed copies (edition Galerie Georges Giroux).

In 1887, Ensor drew The Temptation of St. Anthony, a vicious, freewheeling satire on 51 sheets of a sketchbook. In it are hundreds of miniature drawings depicting Eastern gods, devils, sex, and again a Christ. This work was subsequently exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Free Aesthetic

Because of the fierce bickering between the artists, Octave Maus dissolved the art circle Les XX in 1893, although James Ensor vehemently protested against it. Maus founded a new art circle La Libre Esthétique, this time without members, but only invitees. Ensor wanted to call it quits and wanted to sell all his works for 8,000 Belgian francs, but found no buyer. In his adversity, misunderstood and criticized by his contemporaries, he continued, but precisely because of this, his creative power grew.

Eventually, his distinct vision became more and more accepted by art experts. In 1893, the Brussels Print Room bought a large number of his engravings (he had made 44 in 1888).

In 1894 Ensor was invited to the first exhibition of “La Libre Esthétique” and he himself, together with Guillaume Vogels, founded the “Cercle des Beaux Arts d”Ostende” in his city. That same year he sold 25 engravings to the Print Room of Dresden.In December of that year and prompted by Eugène Demolder, he organized his first own exhibition at the Comptoir des Arts Industriels La Royale in Brussels. This initiative aroused the interest of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which purchased “The Lampist,” the magnificent 1880 work, the following year for 2,500 Belgian francs.

In 1898 he participated in the Salon des Cents in Paris with 25 works, but the expected success did not materialize. Nevertheless, in 1899 a special issue of “La plume” was published, dedicated to Ensor”s works at this exhibition. And the same year the Albertina in Vienna bought one hundred of his engravings.In this year he also painted the well-known “Self-portrait surrounded by masks” in which he presented himself in the midst of his art, a mask among masks.

Ensor”s mother died on March 8, 1915 at the age of eighty. He drew her four times and painted her twice in those days after her long agony (collection Mu.ZEE, Ostend). Her sister, his aunt Mimi, died two years later. With this he said goodbye to the two women who had played a decisive role in his education at the time. Ensor once said in a table speech that his mother and his aunt had guided him financially through his most difficult years.

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Ensor and his masks

Masks were not yet a feature of James Ensor”s early oeuvre. But as he felt ignored or rejected by the art world, he became more and more resistant to it. A conflict situation developed between him and society, so he used highly charged images such as masks, skeletons, death, carnivals and transvestites to make that society look foolish.

He found inspiration for his masks (and his shells) in his mother”s souvenir store. Some of these masks still exist and are kept in the Ensor House in Ostend.

A first work with masks “Annoyed Masks” dates from 1883. It was not yet as symbolically charged, but rather a depiction of a carnival disguise or possibly a reference on his father”s drinking. Here the figure still holds a mask in front of his face. In later works, the figure and mask form a unit. Skeletons first appeared in the 1885 painting “Skeleton Looks at Chinoiserie” and demons in the 1886 etching “Satan and the Fantastic Legions Torment the Crucified” (Aureoles of Christ series). Carnival and travesty appeared in “Carnival on Beach” from 1887.

From 1888 onwards, his well-known works went on an upward trend: “The Entry of Christ into Brussels” (1888), “Masks Defying Death” (1888), “Masks Viewing a Negro Magician” (1888) (in fact an overpainted work from his 1879 academy days), “The Astonishment of the Mask Wouse” (1889), “The old lady with the masks” (1889) and finally his over-famous “The intrigue” (1890), “The masks and death” (1897), “Baptism of the masks” (1891), “The despair of Pierrot” (1892), “Self-portrait with shells and masks” (1917).

Ensor actually used masks to unmask. He wanted to expose the true but hidden face of his mocking or malicious figures.

Skeletons and death form the main theme in : “Skeletons fighting over a hanged man” (1891), the drawing “Death persecutes the human flock” (1887), “Demons tormenting me” (1888), “The multiplication of the fishes” (1891), “Pierrot and skeletons” (1905 and 1907), “Flowered skulls” (1909).

James Ensor, in his struggle against the established society, often chose the common man. A striking example is the colored drawing “The Strike” (1888). Other examples are “The pisser” (depicting a bourgeois man), “The good judges” (1891), “The gendarmes” (1892), “The bad doctors” (1892), “In the music conservatory” (1902).

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Inclusion in the peerage

Although in the meantime he had already exhibited in Hanover (1927), Berlin, Dresden, Mannheim (1928) and Leipzig, 1929 became the glory year for Ensor. It was then that his largest and most important retrospective was organized at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. For the first time, his sensational “Entry of Christ into Brussels” was exhibited and he was raised to the peerage as James Baron Ensor (oil and black pencil on panel). On April 13, 1930, he even unveiled his own statue with his motto “Pro Luce” in the front gardens opposite the Ostend Kursaal. In the meantime he had reached the age of 70.

Ensor produced about 850 paintings during his lifetime, about a third of which were still lifes.

James Baron Ensor died on November 19, 1949, at the age of 89, at the Clinic of the Sacred Heart in Ostend and is buried next to the tower of his beloved church of Our Lady of the Dunes, in the Ostend borough of Mariakerke.

He was a loyal visitor of the concerts and recitals at the Kursaal Ostend. As a self-taught musician, James Ensor played the piano, recorder and harmonium. The harmonium was a gift from the collectors Albin and Emma Lambotte.

Without ever having received a musical education, he began improvising and composing from 1906 onward. Unable to write or read music, he had his compositions notated by others (such as Michel Brusselmans and Georges Vriamont) and adapted for harp, organ, carillon, string quartet, flute quintet, and symphony orchestra.

He himself played his own compositions several times before an audience, albeit in an unorthodox manner. In later years he sometimes considered himself a musician rather than a painter, but received little recognition for this. The organ virtuoso Auguste De Boeck considered his compositions to be rather unpretentious dance pieces.

His compositions were mostly dances and exuded a bourgeois salon atmosphere. His to be named:

2010 was an important year with a number of exhibitions of Ensor”s work. It was then 150 years since his birth in Ostend. Hereafter a few mentions:

The Ensor House in Ostend (Vlaanderenstraat 29) was renovated and expanded in 2020. The museum consists of the original home of the artist and an interactive experience center in the adjoining building. Temporary exhibitions take place there. It also possesses a death mask of Ensor.

Ensor”s archive is located at the Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Sources