James Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860, some thirty years before two other famously eccentric Belgian artists, René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. In some ways, this fact of birth would be emblematic of Ensor’s artistic life: he was ahead of the crowd though often overshadowed by his contemporaries.
Ensor seldom left the town in which he’d grown up: a fishing port on the North Sea that had become a fashionable seaside resort. After studying painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he even returned home to live with his mother. Despite his provincialism, from an early age he was clearly a quite singular character – even if he does look very conventional in his three-piece suit in one portrait by a colleague, the painter Henry de Groux.
Ensor belonged to the petite bourgeoisie: his father was a Brussels-born English engineer with an unfortunate penchant for alcohol and heroin; his mother, a Flemish woman, Maria Catherina Haegheman, ran a souvenir and curiosity shop on the ground floor of the family home. Far from a creative family environment, in her little shop Maria Catherina was neither original nor particularly artistic. She was simply collecting and providing the means for a deep-rooted Ostend tradition: in the shop, peering from among chinoiserie and seashells, were carnival masks, created for a popular festival in Flanders that demanded the most bizarre and terrifying costumes, with false visages large enough that those wearing them would not be recognised. Everyone wanted them. Everyone bought them.
The days of Ensor’s childhood were spent with these grotesque faces, changing from year to year, grinning or grimacing at him from the shelves, while his father drank himself into a stupor. His extravagantly eccentric grandmother, who lived with them, would force her monkey and parrot on him, which he hated.
After his university studies, Ensor began by painting classical portraits and interior scenes, such as The Bourgeois Salon, inspired by the Impressionists. Everything was going well; he was exhibiting. But one day, everything changed – possibly following the rejection of the The Oyster Eater, which he was very proud of, by the Antwerp salon in 1882. Ensor had begun buying masks, hundreds of them from all over the world, and hanging them on the walls of his studio. The masks insidiously introduced themselves into his work, invading it with their subversive sneers, their malice, their morbidity, their extravagance. Ensor began to criticise the church and the king, and to advocate for anarchy.
Still remarkable today, the following string of mask-filled works, such as Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 or The Intrigue, with their strong and seductive colours, have a strangeness reminiscent of Goya or Bosch. But, at the time, almost all of those paintings were turned down by the salons and galleries, and it wasn’t long before the public drifted away. Ensor then went through a dark and bitter period, reclusive until the beginning of the 20th century, when Magritte and Delvaux paved the way for the Belgian art world to open up, at last, to the irrational.
Once again in demand, Ensor was then knighted and awarded the Legion of Honour, and all doors opened. It was then that this man, who could enchant with three brightly coloured shells and terrify with a portrait of an obscene manta ray, astonished everyone. But the honours came too late; Ensor was no longer interested. Instead, he began writing music. Not knowing how to read or write notes, he was happy to improvise on the piano or harmonium. He dreamt of waltzes and ‘musical masquerades’. In 1911, he composed a ballet called La Gamme d’Amour, which was performed several times during his lifetime in some of the greatest theatres.
Ensor’s turn to a different type of artistic expression strikes a common chord with his progression as a painter. In the latter corpus, he disavowed the curiosity shop he grew up in, but was later drawn to its strangeness. Equally, in turning to composition, he seemed to give up on works on canvas to pursue a more respectable medium. And yet, critics (and well-known artists) Paul and Luc Haesaerts judge his music to be full of ‘strident yellows, sinister reds, loquacious greens and heavenly pinks’. It is just as though they were describing one of his paintings, the colours of which surrounded him as a child in that strange small shop by the sea.
Today, the artist’s studio and the shop downstairs exist almost exactly as he left them. The paintings may be reproductions, but the key threads of his life and work are all there: the masks, the musical instruments, the curiosities in glass cabinets. His conventional black coat and hat hang on the wall, positioned slightly off-centre, like a Surreal painting by Magritte in which Ensor has momentarily disappeared…
For more information, visit ensorhuis.be
