Ensor, James Sidney, Baron Ensor (1860-1949)

Belgian painter and printmaker. In a bold style employing vivid colours, he created a surreal and macabre world inhabited by masked figures and skeletons. Such works as his famous Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888; Musée Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) anticipated expressionism. Baron in 1929.

Ensor was the son of an English father and a Flemish mother, and a British subject until 1930, when he became a Belgian. He studied at the academy in Brussels, and first painted dark landscapes and seascapes, but in the 1880s quickly developed a richness of colour and a macabre quality of imagination in which he has been compared with his Flemish forerunners Brueghel and Bosch. He worked quietly at Ostend in a studio over a shop that sold seaside gift oddities, ‘happily confined’, in his own words, to ‘the solitary realm where the mask rules’. 1880-1900 his creative range of subject and style was fully established, appearing in tormented and tragic religious themes and in his grotesque world of masks and animated skeletons. Early works such as his Christ's Entry into Brussels were treated with contempt, but 1908 Emile Verhaeren first recognized his gifts, and the exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels 1929 may be said to have made the (by then aged) painter's reputation. In addition to paintings he produced a large number of drawings and etchings. The most eminent of modern Belgian painters, he is adequately represented in the national collections at Antwerp and Brussels.