James Ensor Prints

About James Ensor

James Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860, the son of an English father and a Belgian mother, and grew up in his parents' souvenir shop, among the carnival masks that would later fill his paintings. He left school at fifteen, trained with two local painters and from 1877 to 1880 attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where Fernand Khnopff was a fellow student. Back in Ostend he worked in the attic of his parents' house from 1880 until 1917 and seldom travelled. His early pictures, such as Russian Music of 1881 and The Drunkards of 1883, are sombre realist scenes, but his palette brightened and his subjects grew stranger: masks, skeletons and carnival crowds, as in The Scandalized Masks of 1883. A member of the Brussels group Les XX, he painted the vast Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 in 1888, and Les XX rejected it. The Intrigue followed in 1890. Recognition came slowly: the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium bought The Lamp Boy in 1895, major exhibitions followed by 1920, and King Albert made him a baron in 1929. He painted less in later life, playing the harmonium for visitors, and died in Ostend in 1949. Ensor's colour is loud and his paint thick and quick, so the masked faces read as vivid caricature first and as something more unsettling the longer you look.