James Sidney Ensor (1860 - 1949)
James Sidney Ensor (1860 - 1949) was active/lived in Belgium. James Ensor is known for Figure, genre, interior and portrait painting.


Medium:Watercolor
Size: 5 1/2" x 9"
Frame Size: 14 1/2" x 15"
Condition: Great, No Blemishes
Style: Abstract
Circa: 1920s

James Ensor was born in 1860 in Ostend, a Belgian seaport and watering place. His parents ran a little junk shop, and Ensor's childhood was obsessed by the dark and frightening attic, full of items from the shop. He attended the Brussels Beaux-Arts from 1877 to 1880. Ostend must have been a very stuffy place, but Ensor could hardly bear to leave it. In his whole life, he made just one trip to Paris, Holland and London each. He was a reclusive man with an eclectic brush, who turned a wide range of styles and influences into a scabrous, satirical vision of grinning skulls and tormented masks. The theme of masks is central to the work of Ensor.

Light, considered a sign of divine immanence, fascinated Ensor. It gives a special tension to his skeleton pieces, mask paintings and street scenes of his best years, from 1885 to 1900. Freed from academic color by the impressionists, Ensor's paintings blossomed into extravagent exorcisms of the ghosts that taunted him. A precursor of Expressionism, he influenced Emil Nolde (who adopted his theme of the mask) and Paul Klee. His fantastical universe foreshadows Surrealism.

It is customary in Belgium, to see Ensor as a man of the people, but his judges and police officers, as well as his waterfront characters, are all painted as subhuman. As a political artist, he was both strident and unfocused. He disliked the Belgian monarchy but could not refuse the Order of Leopold in 1903, or the barony that the next King of Belgium offered him in 1929. After the turn of the century, he painted almost nothing of consequence for fifty years. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, revered and respected. He died in 1949.


PROVENANCE
Private Collection from Long Island

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