ENSOR, James, Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

2. ENSOR, James Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

3. ENSOR, James Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death) 1888 Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 100,3 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

4. ENSOR, James Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death) (detail) 1888 Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 100,3 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

13. ENSOR, James The Assassination 1890 Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 77.2 cm Columbus Museum of Art

14. ENSOR, James The Assassination (detail) 1890 Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 77.2 cm Columbus Museum of Art

23. ENSOR, James The Intrigue 1890 Oil On Canvas, 90 x 150 cm Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

24. ENSOR, James The Intrigue (detail) 1890 Oil On Canvas, 90 x 150 cm Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

30. ENSOR, James Skeletons Trying To Warm Themselves 1889 Oil on canvas, 74.8 x 60 cm Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

31. ENSOR, James Skeletons Trying To Warm Themselves (detail) 1889 Oil on canvas, 74.8 x 60 cm Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

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37. ENSOR, James Skeletons Trying To Warm Themselves Belonging to a group of closely related paintings from the late 1880s, the enigmatic Skeletons Warming Themselves is among the artist’s masterpieces. He has placed three dressed-up skeletons in the foreground around a stove on which is written “Pas de feu” and under it “en trouverez vous demain?”—“No fire. Will you find any tomorrow?” The skeletons are accompanied by a palette and brush, a violin, and a lamp. Presumably Ensor intended these items to symbolize art, music, and literature. If so, the probable implication is that artistic inspiration, or patronage to support it, has expired. Understood as a scene in an artist’s studio, Skeletons Warming Themselves resembles a vignette from the popular medieval and early Renaissance print cycles of the Dance of Death, each print portraying skeletons as an allegorical comment on the vanities of a particular profession or social type. X-radiographs reveal another finished picture beneath this scene. It is a bust-length portrait of a young girl, probably painted before 1883. Ensor’s reuse of an earlier canvas may reflect his own difficult economic condition in 1889.

38. ENSOR, James The Intrigue James Ensor, along with Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, is considered a pioneer of Expressionism. But as a creator of fantastic and bizarre images such as The Intrigue, Ensor reveals his kinship to old masters of the bizarre such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Here, the artist depicted his sister, Mariette in blue hair and green cape, with her top-hatted fiancé, Tan Hée Tseu, a Chinese art dealer from Berlin. The couple's engagement had caused a scandal in the home town of the Ensor family, and the artist, in retaliation, depicts the town gossips who, disguised in their masks, have come out to point, stare, and laugh at the couple.

39. ENSOR, James The Assassination An eccentric visionary, James Ensor created images that defy categorization. After two frustrating years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he returned to his hometown of Ostend and set up a studio in the attic of his family's home and souvenir shop. There he continued his education, studying Old Masters such as Breugel and Bosch, copying etchings by Rembrandt and Goya, and making sketches depicting his family's disquieting domestic life. The Assassination is based on Edgar Allan Poe's gothic tale The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar of 1845, which tells the gruesome story of a hypnotist trying to arrest the process of death by hypnotizing a dying man.

40. ENSOR, James Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death A group of masked figures confronts the figure of Death, centrally situated and draped in whitea color that infiltrates the entire picture. Composed of masks adorned with drapery, hats, and even blue glasses, the arrangement of figures recalls Ensor's earlier still-life compositions. The ubiquitous masks in Ensor's work were likely based on those sold in his family's curiosity shop a few floors below his studio. He explained, "The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence." In this painting, the fantastical masked inventions appear to come alive and challenge Death—perhaps a reflection of the artist's preoccupation with mortality and his hope that he might prevail against its inevitable dominion.

41. ENSOR, James Sidney Edouard, Baron Belgian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Trained in Brussels, he spent most of his life in his native Ostend. In 1883 he joined a group known as Les Vingt (The Twenty) and began depicting skeletons, phantoms, masks, and other images of grotesque fantasy as social commentary. His Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888), painted in smeared, garish colours, provoked outrage. No single label adequately describes the visionary work produced by Ensor between 1880 and 1900, his most productive period. His pictures from that time have both Symbolist and Realist aspects, and in spite of his dismissal of the Impressionists as 'superficial daubers' he was profoundly concerned with the effects of light. His imagery and technical procedures anticipated the colouristic brilliance and violent impact of Fauvism and German Expressionism and the psychological fantasies of Surrealism.

ENSOR, James, Featured Paintings in Detail (2)

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