James Ensor

Name: ARTMAJEUR
Brand: ARTMAJEUR
Rating: 4.9 (2171 reviews)

France •

Artiste (Peinture) •

1860 - 1949

• Artmajeur Editions

James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a painter and printmaker from Belgium who spent most of his life in Ostend. He was a major influence on expressionism and surrealism. He was connected to the art collective Les XX.
James Frederic Ensor, Ensor's father, was a cultured man who studied engineering in England and Germany after being born in Brussels to English parents. His mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was a Belgian. Ensor himself was unmotivated by school and dropped out at age 15 to study art with two local artists. He studied art at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels with Fernand Khnopff from 1877 to 1880. In 1881, Ensor held his first exhibition. He worked out of the attic of his childhood home from 1880 until 1917. He visited France and the Netherlands three times each in the 1880s and spent only four days in London.
Much of Ensor's work, including his 1889 painting Christ's Entry Into Brussels, was rejected as scandalous at the end of the 19th century (1888–89). Octave Maus, a Belgian art critic, famously summarized the reaction of contemporary art critics to Ensor's experimental (and often scathingly political) work: "Clan leader Ensor. The spotlight is on Ensor. When it comes to anarchist principles, Ensor condenses and synthesizes them. In a nutshell, Ensor is a dangerous person undergoing significant development. Because of this, he is a target for assault. Their harquebuses are trained squarely on him. The pungent waste products of the so-called serious critics are dumped on his head." Ensor's defiant response to this criticism is visible in some of his works from the time. In the 1887 etching "Le Pisseur," for instance, the artist is shown urinating against a wall that has the words "Ensor est un fou" written in the style of a critic: "Ensor is a Madman."
Although Ensor was a talented improviser on the harmonium despite never having had formal musical training, he spent much of his time entertaining guests, and his output of new works began to decline as early as the first decade of the twentieth century. Contrary to the advice of his friends, he stayed in Ostend during World War II despite the threat of bombing. He was a respected elder in Belgium and a regular sight on the streets of Ostend thanks to his habit of walking there every day. On November 19, 1949, at the age of 89, he passed away there after a brief illness.