The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice: “Vive La Sociale!” 1501339222, 9781501339226

Citation preview

The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice “Vive La Sociale!” Susan M. Canning

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Susan M. Canning, 2023 Susan M. Canning has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image © James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888, oil on canvas, 252.7 × 430.5 cm. Los Angeles, J. P. Getty Museum, inv. 87.PA.96 (photo: Image courtesy of the J.P. Getty’s Open Content Program) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ­A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3922-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3924-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-3923-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1 The Beautiful Legend of the I 2 Me and My Circle: Ensor’s Social Network 3 Social Themes and Strategies of Critique 4 Ensor’s Women Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

vi xv xvii 1 11 53 103 163 215 218 227 242

Illustrations Plates 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

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James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888, oil on canvas, 252.7 × 430.5 cm, Los Angeles, J. P. Getty Museum, inv. 87.PA.96 (photo: Image courtesy of the J. P. Getty’s Open Content Program) James Ensor, A Colorist, 1880, oil on canvas, 102 × 82 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography) James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (My Disguised Portrait), 1883/1888, 76.5 × 61.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Masks, 1899, oil on canvas, 117 × 82 cm, Aichi, Japan, Menard Art Museum (© photo: Menard Art Museum) James Ensor, The Dangerous Cooks, 1896, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, 1891, 16 × 21.5 cm, oil on panel, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography) James Ensor, The Bourgeois Salon, 1881, oil on canvas, 133 × 109 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Ensor and Leman Discussing Painting, 1890, oil on panel, 12 × 16 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) James Ensor, Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Speak with Sophie Yoteko, 1892, oil on panel, 12 × 16 cm, Bruges, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) James Ensor, Portrait of Emile Verhaeren (Verhaeren Sharpening a Pencil), 1890, oil on panel, 25 × 18 cm, Brussels, Royal Library (KBR), Cabinet Verhaeren, Cabv 00051 (photo: ©AML, Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Brussels) James Ensor, Icon (Portrait of Eugène Demolder), 1893, oil, pencil and gouache on panel, 36 × 21 cm, Bruges, Groeningemuseum (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Chez Miss/Russian Music, 1880–81, oil on canvas, 133 × 110 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Illustrations 13 14 15

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James Ensor, Oyster Eater, 1882, oil on canvas, 207 × 150 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Scandalized Masks, 1883, oil on canvas, 135 × 112 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography) James Ensor, Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, 1887–89, oil on canvas, 109 × 131 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889, oil on canvas, 74.8 × 60 cm, AP 1981 20, Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum (© 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels, Kimbell Art Museum, photo: courtesy Kimbell Art Museum) James Ensor, The Lively and the Radiant: The Entry into Jerusalem, 1885, black and brown crayon and collage on paper, mounted on canvas, 206 × 150.3 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Adam and Eve Chased From Paradise, 1887, oil on canvas, 205 × 245 cm, Antwerp, KSMKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Tribulations of St. Anthony, 1887, oil on canvas, 117.8 × 167.6 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY) James Ensor, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1887–88, colored pencil, mixed media, collage on 51 sheets of paper, 179.5 × 154.7 cm, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago (© The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY) James Ensor, Massacre of the Ostend Fishermen (August 1887) or The Strike, 1888, pencil and color pencil on paper, mounted on board, 34 × 67.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, 1889, pencil and colored pencil on paper, mounted on panel, 16.3 × 21.4 cm, Brussels, Royal Library (KBR), Print Cabinet (© KBR photo: Brussels, KBR) James Ensor, Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around!, 1888, conté crayon and colored pencil on paper, 26.2 × 39.2 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost) James Ensor, Baths of Ostend, 1890, black crayon, colored pencil and oil on panel, 37.5 × 45.5 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost) James Ensor, Battle of the Golden Spurs, 1891, crayon, mixed media, on prepared panel, 37.3 × 46.1 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

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Illustrations James Ensor, The Lady in Distress, 1882, oil on canvas, 100.5 × 80 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Stéphane Maréchalle) James Ensor, Children at Their Morning Toilette (Children Dressing), 1886, oil on canvas, 136 × 110 cm, on depot Ghent, MSK, Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Old Woman with Masks, 1889, oil on canvas, 54 × 47.5 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, Masks Mocking Death, 1888, oil on canvas, 81.3 × 100.3 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY) James Ensor, The Intrigue, 1890, oil on canvas, 90 × 150 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) James Ensor, The Virgin of Consolation, 1892, oil on panel, 40 × 38 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) James Ensor, The Comical Smokers, 1920, oil on canvas, 77 × 66 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: Hugo Maertens, Bruges, courtesy Mercatorfonds)

F ­ igures James Ensor, Self Portrait, 1884, charcoal, white chalk on paper, 75.5 × 57.8 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography) 1.2 James Ensor, Sketchbook page (Carnet Rousseau), c.1882, pencil, ink on paper, 28.7 × 41.1 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (photo: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, Jacques Declercq) 1.3 James Ensor, Self Portrait at Easel, 1879, oil on canvas, 40 × 33 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) 1.4 James Ensor, Self-Portrait, c. 1883 Antwerp, KMSKA, inv. 2708/60, pencil on paper, 19.6 × 29 cm (© www.artinflanders.be photo: Bruges, Hugo Maertens) 1.5 Anonymous, Photograph of James Ensor. c.1883, Antwerp, KMSKA (© KMSKA photo: KMSKA, Antwerp) 1.6 Anonymous, (Édouard Hannon (?)) Photograph of the artist near the Rousseau home (Rue Vautier?), c.1888 (© photo: Ostend, Mu.ZEE) 1.7 James Ensor, My Skeletonized Portrait, 1889, 1/3, etching, 11.6 × 7.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE, Inv. 1.412b (© Mu.ZEE, photo: Mu.ZEE, Ostend) 1.1

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Illustrations James Ensor, Self Portrait “Pas fini” (“Not finished ”), pencil on paper, 22 × 17.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE, inv. 1961/659 (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Cedric Verhelst) 1.9 James Ensor, Haunted Fireplace, 1888, crayon and colored pencil on prepared panel, 24 × 16 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy of the collector) 1.10 James Ensor, Catalogue Page for 1888 Les XX Salon, ink, collage on paper, 48 × 32 cm, Ghent, collection Patrick Florizoone (© photo: Dirk Pauwels) 1.11 James Ensor, The Pisser, 1/1, 1887, etching 14.5 × 10.3 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.04911 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 1.12 James Ensor, Calvary, 1886, pencil, crayon, and oil on paper, 17.2 × 22.2 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Private collection, Belgium) 1.13 Jean Portaels, Crucifixion, 1885, oil on canvas, 650 × 1000 cm, Brussels, St. Jacques Koundenberg (photo: © Brussels, KIK/IRPA: Commissariaat Generaal voor ‘s Lands Wederopbouw) 1.14 James Ensor, Christ Mourned by Angels, 1886, Black chalk on panel, 16.5 × 21.4 cm, Ghent, MSK (© MSK photo: MSK, Ghent) 1.15 James Ensor, Self-Portrait in Front of the Easel, 1890, oil on canvas, 59.5 × 41 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) 1.16 James Ensor, Skeleton Painter, 1896, oil on panel, 37.7 × 46 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) 1.17 Anonymous, James Ensor in His Studio, 1896/97, photograph Antwerp, KMSKA (photo: © Antwerp, KMSKA) 1.18 Léon Frédéric, Studio Interior, 1882, oil on canvas, 158 × 117 cm, Ixelles, Museum of Fine Arts (© KIK-IRPA, photo: Jean-Louis Torsin) 1.19 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, December 25, 1887, ink on paper, 12.5 × 10.5 cm, Brussels, RMFAB, ACAB Inv. 5040 (photo: © KIK-IRPA) 1.20 James Ensor, Call of the Siren, 1891/93, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) 1.21 Jan Van Beers, The Timid One or Sea Bathing at Ostend (Aux Bains de Mer), 1888, photogravure after original painting, 31.5 × 25.4 cm (photo: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 1.22 James Ensor, Demons Teasing Me, 1888, Black chalk with black conté crayon on paper, 21.8 × 29.8 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Ada Turnbull Hertle Fund (© The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY)

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Illustrations

James Ensor, Me and My Circle, 1939, oil on panel, 30 × 24 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) 2.2 James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist’s Father, 1881, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography) 2.3 James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1882, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© Brussels, RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography) 2.4 James Ensor, Woman with Blue Shawl, 1881, oil on canvas, 74 × 59 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Rik Klein Gotink) 2.5 James Ensor, Portrait of My Aunt (Mimi), 1886–88, conté crayon on paper, 29 × 21 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens) 2.6 James Ensor, Portrait of Théo Hannon, 1882, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 50.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens) 2.7 Édouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868, oil on canvas, 146 × 114 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Hervé Lewandowski) 2.8 James Ensor, Ernest Rousseau, 1887, 3/4, drypoint etching on paper, 22.8 × 16.8 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus PK.MP.09489 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 2.9 James Ensor, Sketchbook page (Carnet Rousseau), pencil, conté crayon on paper, 28.7 × 41.1 cm, c.1883, Brussels, RMFAB (© KIK-IRPA, photo: Jacques Declercq) 2.10 Anonymous, Ernest Rousseau Jr and Ensor in the Dunes near Ostend, c.1892, photograph, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© Mu.ZEE, photo: courtesy, Ostend, Mu.ZEE) 2.11 James Ensor, Small Bizarre Figures, 1888, 2/2, etching on paper, 13.3 × 9.2 cm, Ghent, MSK (© MSK, photo: Ghent, MSK) 2.12 James Ensor, Hector Denis, 1890, 2/2, etching on paper, 11.7 × 7.1 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.01218 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum PlantinMoretus) 2.13 James Ensor, The Artist Willy Finch Standing at His Easel, 1882, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 29.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Rik Klein Gotink) 2.14 James Ensor, Portrait of Willy Finch, 1882, oil on canvas, 110 × 95 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Cedric Verhelst)

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2.15 Anon. “Le Salon des XX”, Le Patriote Illustré, 55, (February 2, 1890), (bottom right: “Un ‘coin’ du Salon” (with Astonishment of the Mask Wouse), Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, B 70783 (photo: © Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library) 88 3.1 James Ensor, Afternoon in Ostend, 1881, oil on canvas, 108 × 133 cm, Antwerp, KMVSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) 106 3.2 Paul Signac, The Dining Room (Opus 152), 1886–87, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.5 cm, Otterlo, Netherlands, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum (photo: © Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum) 108 3.3 James Ensor, Man with Cauldron, c.1880, pencil on paper, 74 × 61 cm, Gift of Moshe Lewin, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (photo: © Tel Aviv, Museum of Fine Arts) 109 3.4 James Ensor, The Lamplighter, 1880, oil on canvas, 151 × 91 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© Brussels, RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography) 110 3.5 Installation view, with Lamplighter (near center) and (second to the right) The Drunkards, Salon of Les XX, 1884, photograph, Brussels, RMFAB, ACAB Inv. 4653 (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography) 110 3.6 James Ensor, The Drunkards, 1883, oil on canvas, 115 × 165 cm, Brussels, Belfius Art Collection (photo: courtesy Belfius Art Collection) 111 3.7 Jean-François Raffaëlli, The Absinthe Drinkers (Les Déclassés), 1881, oil on canvas, 108 × 108 cm, San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund, Jay D. and Clare C. McEvoy Endowment Fund, Tribute Funds, Friends of Ian White Endowment Fund, Unrestricted Art Acquisition Endowment Income Fund, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund, and the Yvonne Cappeller Trust 2010.16 (© San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Photo: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) 112 3.8 James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man, 1891, oil on canvas, 59 × 74 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) 117 3.9 James Ensor, Mystic Death of the Theologian, 1880, 1885–86, Pencil, charcoal, and black crayon on paper, mounted on canvas, 97 × 83 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)119 3.10 James Ensor, Study for Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, 1885, graphite and conté crayon, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum (photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum) 123

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3.11 “La Manifestation Socialiste le 15 Août Passant Devant les Ministères (Socialist Manifestation of August 15 (1886) Passing by the Ministries)” Le Patriote Illustré, August 22, 1886, 341, illustration, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience B 70783 (in public domain © Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, photo: courtesy Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, Antwerp) 3.12 James Ensor, Temptation of Christ, 1/1, 1888, etching on Japan paper, 7.9 × 12 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus, PK.MP.01203 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 3.13 James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels at Mardi Gras in 1889, 2/3, 1898, etching, 24.8 × 35.7 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.09502 (photo: https://dams. antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 3.14 James Ensor, The Cathedral, 1886. Etching on zinc in black with hand-coloring on cream wove paper, 24.5 × 17.8 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago 1953.268 (© photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY) 3.15 James Ensor, The Gendarmes, 1892, oil and pencil on panel, 45 × 55 cm, Ostend Mu. ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Cedric Verhelst) 3.16 James Ensor, Doctrinal Nourishment, 1889, etching, 18.9 × 25.1 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus, PK.MP.09498 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum PlantinMoretus) 3.17 James Ensor, The Wise Judges, 1891, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds) 3.18 James Ensor, The Bad Doctors, 1892, oil on panel, 50 × 61 cm, Brussels, Collection de l’Université libre de Bruxelles (photo: Vincent Everarts Photographie) 3.19 James Ensor, The Assassination, 1890, oil on canvas, 60.48 × 77.15 cm, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art: Gift of Howard D. and Babette L. Sirak, the Donors to the Campaign for Enduring Excellence, and the Derby Fund (photo: Columbus Museum of Art) 3.20 James Ensor, At the Conservatory, 1902, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 56 × 71.5 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Patrice Schmidt) 4.1 Alfred Stevens, Young Woman and Japanese Screen, c.1880, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 51.8 cm, Louisville, Kentucky, Collection of the Speed Art Museum Gift of the Charter Collectors and Mr. and Mrs. Jouett

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Illustrations Ross Todd, by exchange, 1989.11.2. (© Speed Art Museum, photo: courtesy Speed Art Museum) 4.2 James Ensor, Lady with a Fan, 1880, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 132.5 × 83 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) 4.3 James Ensor, The Somber Lady, 1881, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography) 4.4 Berthe Morisot, The Artist’s Sister at a Window (Young Woman at a Window), 1869, oil on canvas, 54.8 × 46.3 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection (photo: courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) 4.5 Mary Cassatt, Portrait of Madame J. (Young Woman in Black), 1883, oil on canvas, 80.1 × 63.5 cm, Annapolis, Maryland, Collection of the Maryland State Archives MSA SC 4680–10-0010 (photo: courtesy of the Maryland State Archives) 4.6 Édouard Manet, Repose, 1870, oil on canvas, 150.2 × 114 cm, Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (photo: courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.) 4.7 Mary Stevenson Cassatt, The Tea, c.1880, oil on canvas, 64.77 × 92.07 cm, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (photo: © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) 4.8 Berthe Morisot, Mme. Morisot and Her Daughter Mme. Pointillon (The Mother and Sister of the Artist), 1869, oil on canvas, 101 × 71 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery, Chester Dale Collection (photo: courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) 4.9 James Ensor, Bronze Pot with Apparitions, 1880–85/1886–88, Black crayon on paper mounted on cardboard, 22.7 × 16.7 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost) 4.10 Félicien Rops, “Le Plus Bel Amour de Don Juan,” Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques, 1886, etching, 28 × 21 cm, Namur, Musée Félicien Rops (© Brussels, KIK-IRPA, photo: Jacques Declercq) 4.11 James Ensor, Queen Parysatis 1900, etching on paper, 2nd state, 17.1 × 12 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus PK.MP.04947 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 4.12 Félicien Rops, Temptation of St. Anthony, 1878, pastel and gouache on paper, 73.8 × 54.3 cm, Brussels, KBR, Cabinet des Estampes, Drawing S.V 86652 (© KBR, photo: KBR, Brussels)

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4.13 James Ensor, Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels, 1889, etching and watercolor on paper, 1/1, 26.5 × 30.5 cm, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.09469 (photo: https://dams. antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus) 4.14 Pippaff, “La Femme-Avocat,” Le Tirailleur, October 7, 1888, lithograph illustration (photo: © KRB, Brussels) 4.15 D. Naniez. “Les Chiennes d’Enfer Guidées par M’ame Pipelet (affair Vander Smissen),” Le Patriote illustré, October 17, 1886, lithograph illustration, Antwerp Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience B 70783 (photo: © Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, Antwerp)

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A ­ cknowledgments This book is the result of research over many years and has been sustained through the collaborative support of many colleagues, the resources of numerous museums, libraries and institutions, and funding from fellowships and grants. My study of James Ensor began initially with my doctoral dissertation on the critical reception of the Belgian avant-garde art group Les XX, where Ensor was a founding member and exhibited throughout its ten-year history, and continued in an essay for the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts on the artist’s relationship to his critics. I continued this research on the social context of Ensor’s art practice now developed in this book-length study through several catalogue essays for exhibitions on Ensor at the Barbizon Gallery, at the Drawing Center in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, and at the Art Institute of Chicago and in papers given at several panels at the College Art Association, the University of Oslo, Norway, and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. This research and book have been sustained by the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, research and travel grants from the NEH, the Flemish Cultural Ministry, the Faculty Research Fund, College of New Rochelle, and the Regenstein Foundation at the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York University Scholar in Residence and Faculty Resource Network programs. This project has also been supported in the United States by colleagues at several museums and universities. My sincere gratitude to the Art Institute of Chicago curators and staff, especially its former Director Douglas Druick, Gloria Groom, Chair and David and Mary Winton Green Curator Painting and Sculpture of Europe, Kevin Salatino, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Chair and Curator of Prints and Drawings and Suzanne Folds McCullagh former Chair of Prints and Drawings, Nancy Ireson now Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation, and Sarah Guernsey and Amy Peltz in Publications. I would also like to thank Anna Swinbourne, Executive Director and CEO Hill-Stead Museum and Jane Panetta, Associate Curator and Director of Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, co-organizers of the Ensor retrospective at MoMA. At the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels I thank Curators Dominique Marechal and Inga Rossi-Schrimpf for their assistance and, in particular, Director Michel Draguet for his substantial support of my research, especially the image files of works from the Royal Museum’s collection. Ingrid Goddeeris at the Museum Library and Veronique Cardon at the Archives for Contemporary Art have also been very generous with their time and assistance. The curators at the Mu.ZEE in Ostend have been most helpful, particularly Mieke Mels and Barbara de Jong for their support with resources, and documentary and photographic materials. The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent has sustained my research on Ensor for many years, notably its former director, the now deceased Robert Hoozee, who was helpful in so

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­Acknowledgment

many ways. His supportive assistance has continued with Catherine Verleysen, Head of Collections and Research and Curator Johan de Smet and as well with former Director Catherine de Zegher. The Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts has also been very generous, providing important support, including archival documentation, images, research grants, and travel support as well as informed consultation of their collection through the Ensor Resource Project. I would like to especially thank Elsje Janssen and former Directors Paul Huvenne and Manfred Sellink and particularly Senior Curator of Modern Art, Dr. Herwig Todts, who assisted this research and book in many ways, including his own profound knowledge of James Ensor and his familiarity with resources and information through his work with the Ensor Committee. He has also provided documentary material, including photographs, correspondence and secondary sources as well as access to archives and Ensor’s paintings, drawings, and prints in the collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. I remain thankful to my many Belgian colleagues who have supported my research over the years in numerous ways. I thank Xavier Tricot for his ongoing work on Ensor’s catalogue raisonné and correspondence, as his research has provided all those interested in Ensor with indispensable information and documentation. I am also appreciative of the research and assistance of Patrick Florizoone. His significant collection of Ensor’s works and his archive and nineteenth-century documentary sources will continue to assist scholars in their research on the artist. A deep, grateful thank you to Sabine Taevernier, Ensor expert and member of the Ensor Committee, whose generosity and broad, informed expertise on Ensor, above all his drawings, has proved to be important, even essential to the completion of this project. Sabine has also been particularly helpful with her knowledge of works in private collections. Thank you as well to Ronny and Jessy Van de Velde who have been most generous with access to their collection and documentation of Ensor. Thanks as well to the Brussels gallerists Patrick DeRom and Gilles Marquenie. Others who have provided important support include Pascal Ennaert, Director/Co-ordinator of the Vlaamscollectie, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Curator of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and Dr. Jan Dirk Baetens, Professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. I also thank the helpful staff at the Antwerp City Archives, the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Antwerp, the Plantin-Moretus Museum Library, and the Royal Library in Brussels. Thank you to Marnin Young and Claire Moran for their comments and suggestions and as well thanks to my supportive colleagues Patricia Berman, Jane Block, Sura Levine, Alison Ferris, and Kenneth Silver for their thoughtful and helpful readings, comments, advice, and critique. Last, I want to thank all of my many friends who have nourished and sustained my work on Ensor for many, many years, especially in Belgium, including Hilde and dearly departed Jean Jacques, Linda, Lex and Jef, and Annie and my colleagues in New York, Emily and Margie. Most especially I want to thank Matt for his love and steadfast support.

Abbreviations RMFAB

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique)

KMSKA

Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen)

MSK

Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (Museum voor Schone Kunsten)

Mu. ZEE

Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend

­ACAB

Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

AML

Archives & Musée de la Littérature, Royal Library, Brussels

KBR

Royal Library, Brussels

BTNG-RBHC

Journal of Belgian History

JKMSKA

Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

RBPH

Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire

RUB

Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles (Brussels)

BMRBAB

Bulletin des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique

RACAR

Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review

T

Taevernier, August. James Ensor: Catalogue illustré de ses gravures, leur description critique et l’inventaire des plaques/Geillustreerde catalogues van zijn gravures, hun kritische beschrijving en inventaris van de platen/Illustrated Catalogue of His Engravings Their Critical Description and Inventory of the Plates. Ghent: Erasmus, 1973.

E.

Elesh, James. James Ensor, The Complete Graphic Works published in two volumes as vol 141 of Illustrated Bartsch, edited by Walter Strauss. New York: Abaris Books, 1982.

Cr.

Croquez, Albert. L’Oeuvre grave de James Ensor. Geneva and Brussels: Pierre Cailler, 1947.

D.

Delteil, Loys. Le Peintre-Graveur Illustré. vol 19 Henri Leys, Henri de Braekeleer, James Ensor. Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1925.

Tricot

Tricot, Xavier. James Ensor: The Complete Paintings. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag and Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009. All text citations will be Tricot (2009).

xviii

Introduction

Vive la Sociale! The Belgian artist James Ensor completed the painting for which he is most known, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (Plate 1), in 1888. Originally intended for display at the 1889 exhibition of the Brussels-based avant-garde art group Les Vingt (The Twenty) (hereafter Les XX), but not shown publicly by the artist until 1929, this painting continues to be, more than one hundred years after it was made, a transformational work of art whose radical technique and disquieting representation of contemporary Belgium is still startling to behold. Panoramic in its sweep and suffused with raw color and exaggerated form, Ensor’s painting of a vast carnival crowd, strutting military band, and many masked revelers relentlessly marching forward down a broad urban boulevard threatens to spill out of its frame and into the real world. At the center, a small figure of Christ with Ensor’s features sits on a donkey, hailing the paraders as they pass by. Directly above Ensor/Christ, a red banner boldly proclaims: “Vive la Sociale”—”Long Live the Social One”—acclaiming the power of the individual and announcing the entry of this socially engaged artist into modern Belgium. In his central role as the social “one” in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Ensor enacts his personal call to action, affirming through this visual manifesto the collective, social purpose of his art practice. At more than eight feet tall and fourteen feet wide, the painting in both subject and scale seems deliberately provocative and the artist intent on confronting the bourgeois audience who would have seen it had the canvas been on view at that 1889 Les XX salon. While Ensor’s reputation had grown internationally by the time he exhibited Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 to the public for the first time at his 1929 retrospective at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, the social circumstance at the core of his practice remained. Painting over the more topical references to social and political Belgium of the 1880s, Ensor retained the banner declaring “Long Live the Social One” for all to see. Even as Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 with its scathing critique on mass conformity and contemporary politics remained in the artist’s studio, Ensor continued, especially during his most productive period between 1880 and 1900, to make paintings, prints, and drawings that comment upon, critique, and satirize his contemporary social, political, and cultural milieu. This engagement with his modern experience,

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

seen in Ensor’s choice of subjects and his direct, and, at times, irreverent depiction of contemporary Belgium, along with his representation of class and particularly the social circumstance and experiences of women, offers insight into his life and art practice. At the same time, Ensor’s interaction with the lively social and cultural milieu in Brussels and devoted to Belgian modernism in literature, art, and music would be important to the development of his artistic career, providing camaraderie, patronage, and critical support, as well as an introduction to socialist and anarchist theory and an engagement with current social and political issues. An in-depth discussion of the social context of Ensor’s art practice provides then a more complex understanding of the artist’s practice, especially his themes and subjects, and the strategies of selffashioning and self-promotion he used to advance his personal agenda and career.

Belgium in Ensor’s Time By 1860, the year Ensor was born, Belgium was already one of the most industrialized nations on the Continent, epitomizing the capitalist system that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed first hand while living in Brussels between 1844 and 1847 and critiqued in their Communist Manifesto published in 1848. At mid-century, unregulated industry and capitalism reigned supreme and with a plentiful supply of natural resources and cheap labor, Belgium’s mines, factories, and mills generated a surplus economy, producing vast quantities of highly desirable and exportable goods, mainly coal and other industrial materials (iron, steel, and zinc and, later, chemicals), textiles (linen and cotton), glass, and agricultural products, brought quickly and efficiently to the market over Belgium’s ever-expanding rail lines. The country’s industrial growth was aided and abetted by Belgium’s banks, particularly the Société Générale and the Banque de Belgique, with the government playing an important collaborative role. Providing credit and capital for the core industries of coal and metal and floating the bonds that expanded the railroads, the banks and financiers essentially held the purse strings of the Belgian economy. The Liberal Party, which led the government between 1867 and 1870 and from 1878 until 1884, followed a laissez-faire policy that kept taxes, regulations, and the cost of transportation and communication at a minimum, further consolidating private capital within Belgium’s industrial oligarchy. Controlling the operation of the post, telegraph, telephones, and railroad, the central government also contributed its share to the gross national product (15.7 percent in 1880). With the government essentially operating as a business enterprise and financiers holding much of the power over the circulation of money, any economic downturn easily deepened with speculation and financial mismanagement into a crisis as was the case in the recessions of 1873–74 and 1899–1900. Predominantly Catholic in population, Belgium, a constitutional monarchy where the king shared power with the ruling party, had struggled throughout the last quarter of the century to find a balance between religion and secularism as defined by the Catholic and Liberal parties. Based upon the Enlightenment principles of individualism and rationalism, the Liberal Party contained two wings, the left-leaning Progressives, who would lead the fight for universal suffrage, and the more conservative Doctrinaires

Introduction

3

who, believing the extension of suffrage would bring about economic instability and anarchy, opposed electoral reform that might threaten their power base. Re-elected to the government in 1878 (when Ensor was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts), the Liberals introduced legislation to take elementary and secondary education away from the Jesuits and the Catholic Church who were then in charge of instruction at Belgium’s schools and universities. In 1879 under the ministry of Walthère FrèreOrban (1812–96) and Jules Bara (1835–1900), the Liberals established state-controlled schools that could compete with the Catholic ones. While succeeding in their goal of providing religion-free education, the new schools were a costly drain on public funds, leading to increased taxes and eventually the return of the Catholic Party to majority rule in 1884, the same year as Les XX’s first salon. The Catholics, who would remain in power until the end of the century, soon passed laws giving local control to the schools, thus setting off the “school war” over education that continued for many years. In addition to control over education, the Catholic Party, dominated by right-leaning conservatives and clerics, believed in authority, tradition, moral order, and obeisance to the Pope. When they took over, the Catholics ordered the government to subsidize only “free” or Catholic schools, a plan that led to anticlerical demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, followed by the Catholics passing a law allowing priests to teach in the newly formed public schools. By introducing clerics into lay education, the Catholics overstepped their bounds, causing the Progressive and Doctrinaire wings of the Liberal Party to reunite in opposition to the Belgian king, Leopold II (1835–1909). Leopold, who had succeeded his father to the throne in 1865, worked mainly behind the scenes and used the struggle over education as an opportunity to consolidate his power and reign in the Catholics. When Liberals were elected in local elections in several major cities late in 1884, Leopold forced the Catholics to form a new government led by a former Doctrinaire, Auguste Beernaert (1829–1912), who favored the king’s policies. Although the Catholics remained the majority party throughout the 1880s, they eventually lost governing power to the King and the battle over public funds for schools became less contentious. Beernaert often collaborated with Leopold II to instigate favorable legislation, as did wealthy financiers and bankers who agreed to fund initiatives including major building campaigns and expeditions to the Congo in the early 1880s, granting the Belgian king immense power that far exceeded his constitutional mandate. Leopold, who ruled from 1865 until his death in 1909, had long sought colonies to both sustain the Belgian state and profit financially and politically. After forming a private company, the International African Society, Leopold financed Henry Stanley’s (1841–1904) excursions into the Congo basin that marked out territory from French and British explorers. The 1884–85 Berlin Conference recognized Leopold’s sovereignty over much of the land Stanley had claimed for the Belgian king, leading to the establishment of the Congo Free State in 1885 with money lent to him by the Belgian government with the promise that he would provide for and improve the lives of the native population. Leopold ruled with impunity in the Congo, amassing a personal fortune while exploiting the natural resources first in ivory and then in rubber through harsh work conditions and quotas enforced by his private militia, the mercenary Public Force, as millions died from hard labor and diseases like smallpox, while others lost limbs for failure to meet quotas. Leopold’s

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

exploitation of the people and resources of the Congo in the last decades of the nineteenth century was less known to the Belgian public until Joseph Conrad wrote his series of articles entitled Heart of Darkness in 1899 for Blackwood’s Magazine (published as a book in1902). Continued reports of human rights abuses led to the foundation of the Congo Reform Association to investigate that, along with other inquiries from the Belgian Parliament, eventually compelled Leopold to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium as a colony in 1908 with a payment to him of more than two hundred and fifteen million Belgian francs. Leopold II was masterful in his use of money and patronage to burnish his imperial image without revealing how the Congo had enabled his wealth and power. Throughout the first three decades of his reign, great sums of personal funds derived from the profits of the Congo Free State were devoted to massive building and urban renewal projects in the capital, Brussels, as well as in Antwerp and Ensor’s home town of Ostend, earning him the title the “Builder King.” Leopold also supported fine art exhibitions, regularly visiting the annual Salon and exhibitions by art groups like Les XX, purchasing contemporary work, and sponsoring various artistic projects, especially those that promoted his supposed humanitarian efforts in the Congo. One such project, the 1897 exhibition on the Congo Free State for the Brussels World’s Fair, featured the display of more than eighty chryselephantine sculptures fashioned from ivory donated by the king. For the Belgian public who knew little of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State in its early years, this patronage reinforced the image of the king as an erudite, cultured, and benevolent patriarch and humanitarian whose support for the colony and its peoples was beneficial to the Belgian state, that is, until the late 1890s when investigations and reports of atrocities began to appear in the press. While Leopold’s exploits were less visible, representations of African and Congo peoples did circulate in popular culture, appearing with increasing frequency throughout the 1880s and 1890s in illustrated journals and newspapers, especially in caricatures where they were the subject of ridicule and humor. Regularly portrayed as childlike or primitive and half-naked with exaggerated features, their blackness contrasted to the cultivated whiteness of middle-class Belgians, these cartoons generally reproduced a racist Eurocentric colonialist view of Africans, a stereotype that Ensor repeated in his work. While a relatively small number of families, financiers, and the Belgian king monopolizing most of Belgium’s industrial wealth, especially after the Congo Free State began to turn a profit for the king and his investors, and political power (the approximately twenty thousand or so men of property who controlled the vote), Belgium’s growing middle class located mainly in the cities also benefitted from this unfettered economic growth. While many of the industrialists were part of the upper middle class (the haute-bourgeois), the majority would be classified as lower middle class (the petit-bourgeois). Belgium has been called a nation of shopkeepers with the petite bourgeois equal in numbers to the working class. Expansion of trade and capital generated new economic opportunities for this very entrepreneurial middle class, encouraging them to open stores and shops that catered to the needs of those with money to spend. Profits from business expansion provided in turn discretionary income, money that could be spent not just on enlarging the business but also on leisure,

Introduction

5

travel, and the arts. As members of the petite bourgeois, many of Ensor’s generation of artists and writers benefited from these favorable economic circumstances, turning away from careers in law or business to take up the creative life. Unlike Belgium’s industrial elite or even its enterprising bourgeoisie, little of this economic prosperity trickled down to the labor classes to ease the extreme disparity of their life and working conditions. Although a small country, Belgium was densely populated with a lower class that provided most of the labor, working in agriculture, mines, textile and glass factories or producing lace and other handicrafts at home. The ranks of the working class included not just men but also women and children, some as young as seven and eight, who all worked the same long hours until the late 1880s when laws were passed to prevent child labor and restrict the number of hours women could work. The worker’s life consisted of long shifts, up to twelve to fourteen hours a day, for low wages. Along with long hours and little pay, Belgian workers also had to contend with alcoholism, illiteracy, work-related accidents (especially in the mines), chronic and hereditary diseases, cholera and typhoid epidemics, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, and a high infant mortality rate. When, after half a century of unlimited expansion, little investment in new technology and infrastructure, or attention paid to the renewal of natural resources, Belgium’s hyperkinetic economy began to falter in the 1860s, and when it went into recession in the mid-1870s, already low wages in the factories fell further. With the advent of more efficient technologies in the United States, Prussia, Britain, and Germany, competition increased eventually overtaking many of Belgium’s markets. Thus, even as production continued to rise, prices declined, adding further to the economic downturn which persisted throughout the 1880s and 1890s resulting in vast unemployment, particularly in the coal and textile industries. Coupled with periodic agricultural shortfalls such as the potato blight in 1845 or poor crop yields from years of overplanting, higher costs for grain and bread in the early 1870s further threatened the worker’s already tenuous state. Although the reduction of tariffs and the importation of American grains helped to lower the cost of bread by the late 1870s, the concurrent drop in wages only sustained the poverty of the lower classes with its accompanying despair, alcoholism, and civil unrest. Numerous governmental studies and commissions on working conditions had made government officials and politicians both aware of the circumstance of the working class and suspicious of them, as they knew that the ongoing impoverishment and lack of suffrage (the workers had no voting rights) were perfect breeding grounds for socialist infiltration and workers’ revolt. Although both the Liberal and Catholic Parties continued their hands-off policy with the working class, generally believing that self-help government loans and charitable organizations would stem any rush to join the Socialists, the government made a few tentative steps, already in the 1860s, toward social welfare—providing, for example, discount railway fares so that workers might travel to other regions or countries to seek employment in the hope that better job prospects elsewhere might keep workers unorganized and out of reach of new and potentially revolutionary ideas. Nonetheless, the government’s reluctance to respond to the worker’s conditions set the stage for the economic upheavals and small strikes that began in the early 1860s and eventually to the first major strike by the metal

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

industry workers at the Cockerill mine in Seraing in 1869. With salaries depressed and unemployment rising, the situation only worsened, leading to work stoppages and protests throughout the 1870s and early 1880s. On March 18, 1886, a meeting organized by anarchists in Liège to commemorate the Paris Commune erupted in violence and then a work stoppage that soon developed into a general strike of miners in Seraing and Charleroi. Street demonstrations and the destruction of several glass factories followed, as did the violent police repression resulting in the deaths of twenty-four strikers. The events in Liège galvanized the nascent socialist movement, which had been slow to organize due to a combination of government surveillance and the poverty and general passivity of many Belgian workers. Despite Marx’s manifesto and the growth of the international movement in both Britain and France, the first Belgian Socialist political party, the Belgian Workers Party (Belgische Werkliedenpartij/Parti Ouvrier Belge, hereafter BWP) was not formed until August 1885 in Brussels. The foundation had already been laid, however, in the 1870s with mutual aid societies (to provide financial assistance) and co-operatives, particularly baker’s co-operatives like the Ghent-based Vooruit (“Forward”), founded in 1873 by Edward Anseele (1856–1938) that provided workers with inexpensive bread and other assistance while also organizing and educating them on socialist principles. “The Hydra of Socialism in Belgium,” the title of an 1879 lithograph by Alfred Le Petit illustrated how the Belgian ruling establishment perceived the socialist threat. A lion, alluding to Flanders where the co-operative movement was already strong, sprouts the heads of Socialist leaders while to the side a bishop, a Jesuit, a top-hatted bourgeois, and a judge recoil in horror. This print clearly articulates the perception that socialism, if allowed to gain power could not be eradicated or controlled. Although the BWP set universal suffrage as its main political goal, this objective meant eliminating property and monetary payments as the criteria for voting and extending voting rights to men. The BWP’s program reflected the leftist orientation of its organizers who campaigned for a reduction of working hours, accident insurance paid by employers, and the end of the repressive fine and salary withholding system for work stoppage or delays, lay education for all children, and the abolition of conscription and replacement in the military (the practice by the middle class of paying the lower classes to do their military service). Throughout the second half of the 1880s and early 1890s in Belgium, the BWP agitated for these causes and the right to vote and the same decades Ensor produced his most socially engaged and political work, were dominated by mass demonstrations, strikes, anarchist bombings, and civil unrest culminating in a general strike in 1893. By 1894 the right to vote had been extended to men of all classes and the first Worker’s Party delegates elected to the Belgian parliament. Ensor’s generation both profited from Belgium’s economic prosperity and was politicized by the social unrest. Artists like Ensor could attend art academies supported by the Belgian state in Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp, while at Belgium’s universities, made more accessible due to the educational reforms of the Liberal Party, many of that country’s future writers gained professional training in law and journalism. With youthful exuberance these men wrote poetry and plays, organized exhibition societies to promote their art, and published literary and artistic journals, initiating a lively arts

Introduction

7

scene centered in Brussels and a renaissance of Belgian arts and letters known as the Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium). This young generation of artists and writers debated how and in what manner their creative activities should relate to contemporary experience. Some embraced the tenets of Naturalism and Realism, underscoring in their work the importance of observation and interacting with everyday life. Advocates of Art for Art’s Sake on the other hand believed art should be about art and not play a social role. Some chose to reject modern experience entirely and turn to mysticism and idealism to visualize their conceptual concerns. Ensor began his career as a realist painter with his early work focusing on his Ostend milieu and surroundings, his own petit-bourgeois circumstance and that of the working class. Ensor continued to explore modern experience in Brussels where he came to know artists and writers as well as scientists and theorists whose work promoted socially engagement and practice. One of the most prominent voices was that of the lawyer and playwright Edmond Picard (1836–1924) who insisted that the purpose of art was not amusement or pleasure, but rather its potential to arouse, instigate, improve, fight, and ennoble.1 Championing the revival of a national Belgian art, Picard advocated for the radical, revolutionary role of artists and writers, proclaiming in his 1886 essay “Art and Revolution” that the “The time has come to dip the pen in red ink”.2 The anarcho-communists Ėlisée Reclus (1830–1905) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) went further, advocating for the free individual as an agent for social change. In the anarchist view, until the ideal order of a harmonious balance of free association was achieved, the individual must struggle alone against all forms of political, economic, and personal authority through direct action or “propaganda by the deed.” In the context of the anarcho-socialist advocacy of individual action, the banner proclaiming “Long live the Social One” at the top of Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 gains new meaning. Combined with a large processing crowd that resembles both a carnival parade and a socialist demonstration, it declares “Long live that which is done in a social manner” enunciating to the public the revolutionary power of the individual—the social one. As the vast carnival parade marches forward toward the viewer announcing their allegiance to the many narratives of nineteenth-century Belgium: nationalism and patriotism, colonialism and imperialism, religion and secularism, Ensor as Christ, remains at the center of this procession of contemporary politics and social life. Addressing his contemporaries directly, Ensor uses both the declarative words and the painted image as a provocative incitement to action meant to both confront and challenge.

Best known for his intense self-portraits, masked figures, and representations of grotesque crowds, Ensor seemingly fits the modernist model of a neurotic and alienated individual whose disaffected perspective laid the groundwork for Expressionism. Confined to this role of creative yet isolated Romantic, Ensor becomes for many scholars an artist without agency or intent, his artwork a reflection of personal estrangement

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

and psychological trauma. Even though his paintings and drawings, especially in the first twenty years of his career comment, often with a strong satirical voice, on his contemporary times or represent the radical perspectives of current art practice and social theory, most scholarly discussions of Ensor’s art practice emphasize his estrangement and withdrawal from contemporary life and his frustrated relationships with women. During his lifetime, Ensor actively encouraged this interpretation, portraying himself in self-portraits as crucified by the public, tortured by critics, and tormented by demons. Although reflective of his desire for recognition, these self-portraits promoted Ensor as an avant-garde artist while also concealing other aspects of his life and career. Even if Ensor continues to be associated with romantic notions of alienation and isolation, he was certainly not the solitary artist suffering in his attic studio. In fact, throughout his most productive and creative period between 1880 and 1900, Ensor was very involved with his contemporary milieu and aware of current events while also enjoying the support—critically, socially, and financially—of friends, artistic colleagues, and critics. Through these social and creative contacts, Ensor came to know progressive politics, radical social theory, and the rewards of self-promotion. When the support of his artistic community fell short of his expectations in the late 1880s, their supposed incomprehension only focused his artistic vision, leading to the creation of some of his most provocative and original images, including Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. As this book will show, in fashioning a public identity that joined antagonistic, avant-garde behavior with Belgium’s rich tradition of satire, burlesque theater, and carnivalesque inversion, Ensor mobilized his art practice and individual perspective on modern experience to make visible his radical anarchist perspective and transgressive critique of Belgian society. Chapter  1 examines Ensor’s self-portraits as a vehicle for this self-fashioned, performative social critique. Rather than the singular, fixed identity, these self-portraits propose a more complex and fluid model, one that circumvents traditional definitions based on class, occupation, or gender while also reflecting current debates on the nature of the social and artistic self central to realist/impressionist and symbolist art theory. This chapter situates Ensor’s self-portraits within the social context of their production in late nineteenth-century Belgian popular culture and discusses his engagement with performance and masquerade, particularly the burlesque narratives of street theater and carnival and the representation of the transgressive body through cross-dressing, parody, and masking. Adopting a variety of disguises, Ensor uses the expressive and activist potential of his subjectivity to insert his disruptive, critical artistic presence into the contemporary cultural and political discourse. In fashioning this public identity as a marginalized outsider, Ensor develops an alternate model for embodying and articulating his social identity and artistic critique. Chapter  2 discusses the formation of Ensor’s social identity by examining his personal and artistic milieu, including his relationship with his family in Ostend, his social circle at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, the art group Les XX, the Rousseau family and the progressive community of scientists, liberal politicians, socialists, and anarchists who frequented the Rousseau’s salons as well as his friendships with contemporary poets, writers, critics, and patrons in Brussels, Ostend,

Introduction

9

and Antwerp. Refuting the portrayal of the artist as isolated and out of contact with his contemporaries, this more inclusive view of Ensor’s interaction with his cultural milieu presents the artist as an active, participatory member of the Belgian avantgarde who regarded his position as central and critical to current cultural, social, and political discourse. Chapter  2 also considers Ensor’s response to negative criticism and the strategies he devised to counter these opinions, including the use of satire and carnivalesque inversion. Chapter 3 focuses on the social and political environment in which Ensor lived and made his art and found reflection in his subjects and manner of representation. In the 1880s and 1890s, Ensor’s work makes direct reference to current social and political issues, including debates over national heritage and identity; Belgian politics and the rise of the BWP; partisan fights over education, military service, and voting rights; the social unrest of this period, including the turmoil of strikes, mass demonstrations, and anarchist actions; and the acquisition of the Belgian Congo. Ensor’s paintings, drawings, and prints also examine the subtleties of class relationships and values through depictions of working-class and bourgeois life. This chapter explores Ensor’s self-identification with Christ, the social meaning of his religious imagery and themes, and the cultural discourse of his depictions of St. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Joan of Arc. In addition to religious subjects, Ensor’s paintings, etchings, and drawings also address numerous social issues of the time including alcoholism, madness and degeneracy, contagion and disease. In other works, Ensor’s engages with and critiques the discourse of nineteenth-century capitalism through depictions of materialism, commodity, and middle-class leisure while other representations reflect the anxious psychology of modern urban life, including fear of the masses and the public/private narrative of the home and domestic interiors. This chapter also investigates the sources of Ensor’s imagery in Belgium’s material culture, especially current debates on disease, science, hygiene, and health, and argues for his use of artful ruse connected with deviance and signifiers of disorder, contagion, and madness to strategically stage his dissent and social critique. Chapter 4 investigates Ensor’s images of women, a problematic area in his work. While the literature on Ensor regularly describes him as either a virgin who was afraid of women or as a misogynist who hated women, an examination of primary sources including letters and sketchbook imagery presents a more complex and nuanced view. This chapter incorporates new archival material with a discussion of Ensor’s representations of women and considers how these depictions relate not only to the artist’s values and social identity but also to broader societal attitudes toward women in the late nineteenth century. This chapter examines Ensor’s exploration of women’s experience of middle-class public and private life through his paintings of domestic interiors and family portraits. Ensor’s close friendships with the women, some of his earliest supporters and patrons, are also discussed. This chapter also considers his use of strategies such as cross-dressing and travesty to circumvent social roles, and the role that his sexuality and gendered perspective plays in his choice of subject, his manner of artmaking, and his representation of difference. The standard interpretation of Ensor as a misunderstood and alienated artist tends to devalue his social radicalism thus minimalizing the scope of his social and

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

political critique and the impact of his social engagement on his stylistic development and choice of subjects. To look at Ensor from the context of his contemporary sociopolitical and cultural milieu is to move beyond the constructions of his practice that replicate the stereotype of the modern artist as a disaffected outsider, a trope that, as this study will show, Ensor himself reproduces as a position of agency and mode of dissent. To view Ensor as an artist interacting with and engaging with his times is to see him as the modernist he strives to be and the expressive symbolist he becomes.

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The Beautiful Legend of the I

In a large easel-sized self-portrait drawn when he was twenty-four (Figure 1.1) James Ensor, dressed in a suit and tie, portrays himself as a realist artist and up-and-coming talent. Showing off his skill at self-promotion, Ensor engages the public directly. Hand and finger pointing emphatically upward toward his theatrically lit face, he looks out toward his audience with piercing inquisitive eyes and a cool and confident regard. In this dramatic fashion, Ensor announces his identity as an artist and prominent member of the emerging Belgian avant-garde. That same year, Ensor anonymously published “Three Weeks at the Academy” in the journal L’Art moderne, an “episodic monologue” chronicling the experiences of a young Flemish painter studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. After weeks of confusing and contradictory advice from inept and prejudiced professors, this “mute pupil” quits the Academy and joins the artist collective Les XX. At the essay’s end, all of his submissions are rejected from the official Salon.1 Full of humor and verbal puns, this irreverent, thinly disguised autobiographical account of Ensor’s three-year stint at the Brussels Academy served as a remarkable bit of self-promotion, one that accented his importance. Published the same year that Les XX held their debut salon in Brussels (where Ensor showed as a founding member after his work had been twice rejected from the tri-annual Belgian Salon), “Three Weeks at the Academy” promoted Ensor’s adversarial posture, reiterating, as had the self-portrait, his lively give-and-take with the public. Throughout his long life, Ensor repeatedly represents himself, using his body and especially his face to explore his artistic and social status in more than one hundred self-portraits. Many of these images are self-consciously theatrical with Ensor assuming a variety of roles, including that of an artist, social critic, and commentator on domestic life. At times, he delights in the satirical potential of disguise, associating himself with skeletons, insects, and even a urinating fool. In several instances, he crossdressed, portraying himself as a woman. Most famously, Ensor depicts himself as Jesus Christ and in this guise proposes a strong moral and social critique of contemporary Belgian life. Part observer, part actor, and always the avant-garde artist, Ensor’s selfportraits fashion a public identity that joins ambition and self-promotion with social engagement while also exploring the concept of a singular fixed identity and the transgressive and revolutionary potential of expressive subjectivity. This chapter investigates the ways in which Ensor employs self-portraiture to construct a public identity as a modern Belgian artist and promote his artistic agenda

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Figure 1.1  James Ensor, Self Portrait, 1884, charcoal, white chalk on paper, 75.5 × 57.8 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography)

and practice. Influenced by modernist theory with its emphasis on individualism, personal expression, and activism and energized by the disruptive critique he discovered in caricature, satire, and burlesque theater and the radical ideology of anarchist and socialist politics, Ensor’s self-portraits deploy performance and selfpromotion to represent himself as an artist intent on a successful career and a socially engaged individual involved with the social and cultural issues of his times. An early drawing saved by his friend Mariette Rousseau (1850–1926) in a sketchbook makes clear the extent of Ensor’s ambition (Figure  1.2). In numerous self-portraits scattered across the page, the tall, slender artist dressed in the requisite long coat and top hat of the bohemian, often with a portfolio under his arm, rushes about, running up stairs, or tipping his hat in greeting. At the lower left, he plays the piano (that also serves as the “J” of his signature), his long legs stretched out beneath. Sarcastic and self-deprecating, in this drawing Ensor presents his quest for artistic recognition as an amusing performance complete with musical score. While obliquely referring to the challenging and competitive environment of his contemporaneous art world, this comical drawing acknowledges Ensor as an artist intent on career and success. By the 1880s, when Ensor began his career, the romantic notion of the artist working in his studio apart from the world—a trope Ensor would later use to

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Figure 1.2  James Ensor, Sketchbook page (Carnet Rousseau), c.1882, pencil, ink on paper, 28.7 × 41.1 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (photo: © KIKIRPA, Brussels, Jacques Declercq)

portray himself as an isolated visionary in the service of his expressive style—had given way to the visual affirmation of realist and impressionist aesthetics, the imperatives of the commercial marketplace, and the importance of self-promotion for sales. As Ensor’s drawing makes clear, in Belgium, an artist, especially one who does not follow the academic route, could not succeed just making art. In reality, the public understanding of contemporary artists and their work was intimately related to their representation and reception in the social sphere of present times and the commercial reality of an ever-expanding network of salons and group shows, artist societies, and solo exhibitions that any enterprising artist needed to sustain a career. Yet even as artistic identity was increasingly allied with public notions of the artist and commodity—whether the establishment or the artistic avant-garde—modern theory emphasized individualism in style and the personal, interpretive, and expressive aspects of one’s practice. Ensor’s selfportraits both survey this modern condition and the artist’s everyday experience and offer, through their self-fashioned representation and centralizing of the artist’s role, an alternative perspective full of agency and power. In turn, this approach provided Ensor with a strategy for making visible his identity and social critique.

Studio Dialectics: Me and Not Me Many of Ensor’s early self-portraits depict him as an artist. Standing at the easel or seated sketching, he is both the subject of his gaze and the sole producer of his public identity. Whether looking up from a sketch pad, peering out from a dark background, or turning toward the viewer, Ensor seems intent on capturing ever-changing facial expressions in the wilting scrutiny of his own regard. Often concentrating on his face, head, and upper

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torso, the drawings witness the transformation of the artist from a gawky teenager with a wispy mustache to the bearded young man of his 1884 self-portrait dressed in the broad cravat and dark jacket costume of a bohemian artist. Acknowledging a preoccupation with his own artistic and social identity, these early self-portraits focus on Ensor’s youthful, ever-changing appearance even as each shifting pose reinforces his goal of describing immediate experience through the inquiring eye of temperament. Aspects of physiognomy and facial expression, always rendered with careful attention to detail, and conveyed in loose, tonal gestural marks, link these self-portraits to Naturalism and Realist theory, then dominant in progressive Belgian literary and artistic circles. Ensor’s interest in physiognomy and expression is derived in part from his studies with Jean-Francois Portaels (1818–1895) at the Brussels Academy and his reading of the French naturalist novelist Emile Zola (1840–1902) introduced to him by his friend, critic and fellow art student, Théodore (Théo) Hannon (1851–1916). Zola, who also wrote art criticism, extended the concept of physiognomics to the analysis of modern art practice, seeing in the direct painting of artists such as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Édouard Manet (1832–1883), and the Impressionists, all of whom Ensor admired, evidence of a powerful and original temperament. Painted when he was nineteen, Self Portrait at Easel (Figure  1.3), depicts the young artist standing next to an easel, wearing a smock and holding a palette and

Figure 1.3  James Ensor, Self Portrait at Easel, 1879, oil on canvas, 40 × 33 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

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brushes. Using a typical Belgian Realist palette of gray, black, ochre, beige, and white with touches of red and blue paint applied with both palette knife and brush, Ensor describes his daily experience in the studio. As the solid mass of his body emerges from the murky background light, Ensor pauses as if between strokes, his youthful, beardless face and piercing eyes looking out toward the viewer. At the same time, the large oval palette with its nearly abstract swirl of color and paint at the center of the composition acts as a visual counterpoint to the atmospheric milieu of the surrounding studio space. Holding the tools of his trade, his head and body encircled by a thicket of verticals and diagonals formed by the easels in the background, Ensor effectively frames himself within the nexus of his studio practice, affirming through this presentation his identity as a Realist painter. Even if this visual exchange is only between the artist and a mirror, its reciprocity affirms an underlying, albeit fictive, pictorial narrative. Representing himself in the process of painting a canvas, no doubt the same self-portrait we are now privileged to see, Ensor’s facial expression remains circumspect and reserved. Given the semblance of objective distance, the entire scene, drawn from observation and rendered in paint, presents the artist in a matter of fact manner that is quite distinct from the more demonstrative 1884 self-portrait discussed above while also providing a good example of Ensor’s early and enthusiastic investigation of realist practice. The humble setting of a dimly lit studio, the self-conscious informality of posing in an artist’s smock, even the emphatic use of the palette knife, all join to convey an informal portrait of an artist at work. Yet despite the suggestion that Ensor has just interrupted his work, the composition is carefully composed, its real narrative agenda cloaked by a feigned naturalness of pose as Ensor allies his self-representation with both the romantic tradition of the sensitive studio-bound artist and a realist view with its emphasis on contemporary immediacy. What indeed could be more outside(r) to the academic tradition than a young Belgian artist in the late 1870s laying down paint thickly with brush and palette knife while directly confronting himself and his implied audience with the truth and sincerity of his own admittedly subjective gaze? Ensor’s use of the palette knife allied him with contemporary Realists like the Belgian Guillaume Vogels (1836–96), who was a regular painting companion in Ostend, the Greek Périclès Pantazis (1849–84) whom he knew through Vogels, and the controversial French painter Gustave Courbet. As late as 1879 many Belgians still associated Realism and especially Courbet with leftist politics, social critique, and an anti-authoritarian attitude. Courbet, whose portrait Ensor copied in his sketchbook (Antwerp, KMSKA, 2711/119), was well-known to the Belgian public having exhibited there frequently throughout the 1860s, but in the 1870s he was known more for his radical politics due to his participation in the French Commune and role in the destruction of the Vendome column. Courbet’s subsequent exile in Switzerland in 1873 only further allied his realist practice with radical individualism, anarchy, and civil war. By the time of his death at fifty-eight in 1877, two years before Ensor paints his self-portrait at the easel, Courbet had become almost legendary to Belgium’s emerging generation of Realist artists. Courbet’s influence on artists like Vogels and Charles Hermans (1839–1924) along with other members of the independent artist collective, Société Libre des Beaux-Arts (Free Society of Fine Arts), could be found in their use

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of the palette knife, preference for direct observation, and choice of social subjects. Painted while still a student at the Brussels Academy, Ensor’s 1879 self-portrait boldly asserts his independence and individualism, its technique, placement, and setting enacting an identification with the radical, socially critical views of his artistic mentors Courbet and Hermans while at the same time advertising his realist credentials.

Man in a Mirror Like many of Ensor’s early self-portraits, this self-portrait was made with the aid of a mirror—a common practice of this time—forming a cycle of authenticity, selfreflexivity, and artifice that acknowledges the immediacy of observation, the primacy of the personal, and the centrality of the artist in the production and public reception of his own pictorial reality. As Emile Verhaeren (1855–1918) noted in his 1908 monograph on the artist: “It would be surprising if Ensor, who loved his art above all and particularly cherished its creator, that is to say, himself, had not multiplied his own effigy to the infinite. Let us add that when he looked into the mirror, he always had an obliging and free model with brush and palette in hand.”2 Describing himself as an artist and continually posing, Ensor becomes both the maker and subject of his own gaze, with the mirror acting as a collaborator, providing a seemingly objective reflection of reality while also acknowledging the play of subjective interpretation. In an early painted self-portrait, anecdotally titled Big Head (1879, Ghent, Private collection), Ensor’s tightly cropped head turns to peer back toward the viewer from the edge of the canvas, his dense, material presence built up from thick slabs of beige and gray paint with a bit of white highlight. The facture of this loosely rendered surface combines with the artist’s piercing look to suggest the intimacy of a private encounter, but one that is ironic, even contrary. While the semblance of detached observation joins with realist technique to signal truth, this self-portrait presents Ensor in the way he wanted himself to be seen, that is, as a bohemian artist whose face nevertheless remains a mask. Beyond the head, in the dark recesses of the painting’s background plane, another rectangular shape acts as a framing device, alluding to both the mirror into which the artist gazes and the canvas on which this image is produced. This shape within a shape also defines the relationship of the head to the foreground space and its proximity to the viewer’s space. Containing and enclosing Ensor within an interior, this rectangle simultaneously underscores the painting’s fiction. Like the mirror it references, the painting is not a re-presentation of reality but rather its mediated other, an impression fabricated by the artist whose face confronts the public outside the frame. Everything in the painting, in turn, becomes self-reflexive, constantly referring back to its artifice: as swatches of paint whose color and placement coalesce into forms; as a rectangular shape that acts as both canvas and mirror; as the manufactured image of the artist whose face and gaze directly intersect with the external world of observation; and as the internal, contrived space of the painting. Accenting the candor of his gaze as well as a certain wariness, Ensor has a bit of fun with pictorial illusion, attesting to his self-identification as a realist provocateur even as he signals, at the very start of his

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career, his realization that painting in general and self-portraiture in particular, could serve as a form of public address. Little Head (Portrait of the Artist), 1879 (Belgium, Private collection), reprises the same framing mechanism of mirror and easel found in Big Head. This time Ensor represents himself as looking even more directly over his shoulder, his head turned to look back toward the viewer. Once again, he represents himself as an artist with a palette, the rectangular form in the background now even more directly resembling an easel. The juxtaposition of the canvas, easel, mirror, and frame sets up a play between surface, reflection, and pose with Ensor acting as the mediator between perceived pictorial reality in the painting and the external world beyond. This intervention of the personal, as the intermediary and interpretive source within representation, lies at the heart of both Realist theory and the aesthetics of the emerging Impressionist movement, as both emphasize the role of the artist in the production of meaning. When applied to the self-portrait, the potential agency of this active subjectivity for both manipulating and masking or perhaps actively acting out a role is never clearer. These early self-portraits also explore the fragmentary, disembodied, and changeable aspects of experience. Big Head, for example, emphasizes the artist’s face and probing eye, separating this act of painterly inquiry from the hand that reproduces it. In Little Head, the pose and activity of looking are repeated but now the inclusion of the palette and easel with the artist’s head and upper torso define the moment and activity more immediately. The most developed of the three paintings (for which these two paintings could be considered studies), Self-Portrait at Easel combines these fragmentary glimpses into a composite whole that both replicates and denies the reality of the painting it purports to describe. Representing himself as the aggregate of the fragments and moments that characterize both making a portrait and being an artist, Ensor disguises the reflected source of his vision, reversing in this painting the left-right of the mirror inversion. Yet even as he acknowledges pictorial illusionism, Ensor simultaneously admits to the painting’s underlying artifice. Indeed, rather than defining the fiction of realistic reportage, the painting’s heavily worked surface asserts the artist’s presence and position, immersing him in the painterly milieu of his own making. Ensor’s constantly shifting look counteracts any notion of definition or fixed position, or for that matter, any hope of verisimilitude, thereby allowing him, and by implication the viewer, to discover anew these acts of observing and creating. As much about the process and performance of their making as they are descriptions of artistic ambition, these self-portraits bear witness to the construction of Ensor’s public identity. In other self-portraits made between 1883 and 1886, Ensor continues to emphasize his eye in the act of looking and recording from a mirror reflection. In one drawing (1883, Ostend, Private collection), he synthesizes the furtive acts of observation into a single moment of looking upward. But with the body cut off at the chest and no other reference to the sitter’s status or occupation other than perhaps his coat and tie, Ensor carefully includes his name, date, and the inscription “portrait of the artist” as a reminder of his essential role in this production. Even more personal in its casual immediacy derived from a mirror reflection is an 1888 drawing of Ensor wearing a top hat and glancing over his shoulder (Zurich, Private collection), a representation

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that remains remarkably similar to a description of the artist written ten years later by Blanche Rousseau: “Standing in an obscure corner I still see this tall, thin, pale, black figure—his hand elegant and hesitating, half held toward us, but most particularly the quick inquisitive look of his agile eyes. These were extraordinary, shy, provoking, soft, sarcastic, and shifting, flickering up and down while he bent his large stiff body. As always he wore his black lustrous curly hair parted in the middle.”3 In his self-portraits from the 1840s, Gustave Courbet also utilized a mirror to fashion portraits of demonstrative public display, in which an overt theatricality mingles with sincerity and the exploration of inner states of experience. Michael Fried sees in these self-portraits an admission of Courbet’s embodiment through which the artist lends visual form to the internal dialogue the artist had with his imagined public.4 Petra Chu goes even further, connecting Courbet’s theatrical posing to the artist’s desire for celebrity and self-definition.5 Like Ensor’s own early self-portraits, Courbet, in works like Self-Portrait with Leather Belt (1845–46, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), The Wounded Man (c.1848, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), and Self-Portrait with Pipe (c.1849–50, Montpellier, France, Musée Fabre), focuses attention on his facial expression, positioning his body close to the pictorial surface and emphasizing his hand as a conveyor of inner feeling. By portraying experience as emanating from within his own body, Courbet lends visibility to his interior state and interpretive perspective, accentuating his primary role as an intermediary between personal experience and public life. Fried believes that Courbet’s closed or half-closed eyes and attempts to avoid or minimalize confrontation render these self-portraits unconscious and intuitive, thereby underscoring the artist’s position as both painter and beholder.6 This denial or discounting of Courbet’s agency circumvents the fact that these images were made with the assistance of a mirror. Even if he attempted to disguise his mirror source or veil his gaze, Courbet’s act of looking at himself and his closeness to the frontal picture plane echoes the mirror’s reflective surface, reinforcing the exchange of glances and spectatorship that, like Ensor’s early self-portraits, join the private act of looking with the production of a highly visible public persona. As Chu points out, Courbet’s conscious effort to construct a cultural and social context for himself in these posed self-portraits underlines the important role self-promotion played in the increasingly commodified art world of the midnineteenth century.7 Both Courbet and Ensor use their self-portraits, each in their own highly dramatic fashion, to engage both themselves and their audiences with the dynamics of subjectivity and observed reality that had so intrigued contemporary theoreticians. Édouard Manet, another Realist artist that Ensor admired and copied, also utilized mirrors in his paintings to explore this correspondence between art and artifice, observation and personal interpretation. The mirror filling the background in Manet’s A Bar at Folies-Bergère (1881–82, London, Courtauld Institute Galleries), a painting that Ensor more than likely saw at the Paris Salon of 1882 as he also had paintings on view there,8 asserts its participatory role in the spectacle and surveillance of modern public life. With its play of reflective surfaces, this mirror describes, as does the painting’s imagery and technique, an internal dynamic of observation and imagination affirming the truth of emotional interpretation that had been the goal of both Impressionism and the Positivist theories of Émile Littré (1801–1888) and

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Hippolyte Taine (1828–1923). In his refusal to match the barmaid to her mirrored reflection, Manet allows the flux and facts of the social reality that the mirror purports to reflect to remain ambiguous. Leaving the mirror’s surface a maze of painted strokes that loosely coalesce into a distorted facsimile of visual perception, Manet declares painting as an artifice infused with a psychological reality drawn from both observation and subjective musings. In Jack Flam’s discussion of this painting, the mirror in A Bar at Folies-Bergère serves as a bridge between the visible and the imaginary, the real world, and revelry in which multiple narratives and levels of consciousness are described and given equal pictorial significance.9 Rather than reconstitute into an illusion that faithfully matches the more descriptive world implied as existing in front of Manet’s painting, the mirror surface marks off a painterly zone lying somewhere in an imaginary space both within and beyond the painting’s frame. By willfully reassembling what Manet might have seen, remembered, or created anew, the painting, subject, and technique collaborate to deconstruct the conventions of Realism. This “annihilation,” as Flam terms it, of the spectator’s physical reality transforms pictorial description into an “elliptical, metaphysical narrative,” one in which the viewer is both observer and active participant in the artist’s reconstruction of the pictorial space.10 Even if our presence is ambivalent and transparent and our participation subject to the artist’s willful and purposeful manipulation, A Bar at the Folies Bergère nevertheless stresses the centrality of Manet’s subjectivity over any pretense of scientific distance and objectivity, asking instead, like Ensor’s mirror-based self-portraits, that we see the world as the artist does. The mirror becomes then an apt instrument for contemplating this interaction between personal subjectivity and the shifting spectacle of modern urban life, an aspect that attracted the commentary of contemporary writers. For the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), the mirror epitomized the duality of modernism: “Modernity: it is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.”11 Yet for Baudelaire, this exchange between the observer and the mirror remains at its essence a mediated experience between the self and other (what both Baudelaire and Littré termed the “me and not me” (“moi et non-moi”), that is, the intersection of the interior, personal and subjective place of the individual and the external world of the gaze. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) also explored the paradoxical nature and tension between reality and its reproduction in his 1884 novel Against the Grain (À Rebours). In this work, the mirror acts as a device for contemplating both the nature of the material world and the ways artifice can be fabricated and maintained. Although Des Esseintes, the protagonist, prefers to escape the physical and natural world by remaining within the hallucinatory interior world of mirrored reflection, the mirror that is the source of his contemplation can only reflect reality. Huysmans’s hero dwells in this reflection, celebrating in his looking the primacy of the artificial and imaginary over the natural and observed. Yet even as the mirror delivered this heightened self-consciousness to one who looked, it also encouraged and indeed abetted the desire for surveillance that in the nineteenth century, as Helen Jewett points out, was expected to produce and maintain public order.12 Littré, Taine, and the French philosopher and Positivist Auguste Compte (1798–1857) also emphasized the central role of subjectivity and artistic agency, as it was

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individualism and imaginative vision that moved the artist beyond merely recording the phenomena of experience, thus joining the engagement of truth and sincerity to a broader social context. Compte believed that artists used their imagination to make observation more perfect or ideal and, in this manner, improve society. For Taine, artists drew their ideas from real experience and interaction with the environment. While the goal of art for him was the discovery of the ideal within the real, subjectivity was essential to giving this ideal a form: “things pass from real to ideal when the artist reproduces them in modifying them according to his idea.”13 Littré was interested in the relationship between psychology and the physiology of perception. For Littré, only individual impressions, rather than knowledge of external objects, can reveal the truth. Equating impression with sensation, he affirmed the relative nature of all experience as well as the value and validity of subjective knowledge, asserting that the only truth represented in painting was that of the artist’s temperament or personality. In other words, the artist paints a “self ” on the pretext of painting “nature.”14 While upholding the central position of the artist in interpreting and making visible the spectacle of modern experience, these theorists insisted on the artist’s social responsibility—it is not enough to simply validate personal experience through representation—rather, the artist plays a critical role in making essential truths visible so that they might inspire and uplift society as a whole. This awareness engendered by the mirror’s doubled gaze—that of looking and being looked at—inspired not only the intense self-regard of Ensor’s self-portraits but also his deliberate effort to be recognized and perceived as a socially engaged individual. Be it as an artist, or, as will be discussed shortly, any number of other characters that replicate his position within and response to his contemporary world, Ensor steadfastly fashions a public role for himself. At the same time, his backward glance in the mirror includes the public in his watchful game, turning surveillance in on itself. In this juncture, Ensor’s self-portraits maneuver between private looking and public observation, personal reflection and civic scrutiny, his public self always posed and on guard. Exploring his image through the mirror in these often-startling early self-portraits, Ensor presents the “truth” of his individualism. Defining his immediate environment and representing both the artifice of his studio and the performance of his art practice, Ensor takes the first steps toward addressing his role within contemporary society.

“Selfie” Narratives Like the mirror, photography offered Ensor another resource for images and subversive play. Ensor’s entire life is well documented by photographs, beginning from childhood and ending with a photograph taken on his deathbed. Many of these are portrait photographs in which his posing is obvious. As well, although he does not make his own photographs, Ensor often uses them as source material for his paintings, drawings, prints, and often self-portraits. Ensor, it seems, understood early on the potential for posing and cutting up before the camera. Ensor first discovered photography in his native city of Ostend, more than likely through his first teacher, Edouard Dubar (1803–79). Dubar, a painter and

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lithographer, saw the potential of this new medium for making multiples and, like many other contemporary printers, set up a photography studio in a corner of his print shop. Ensor also encountered photography in his strolls along the Ostend boardwalk where enterprising entrepreneurs built temporary booths to take souvenir portraits of vacationing tourists against painted backdrops or in studios on the street. With the advent of the dry collodion process, silver-bromide papers, and roll film in the early 1880s, photography and especially portrait photography became popular and accessible, especially for Belgium’s middle class. When Ensor moved to Brussels in 1877 to attend the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts that city was already a growing center for photographers both amateur and professional. During the three years he studied at the Academy, more than forty-five photography studios opened in Brussels. Even after he returned to Ostend in 1880, Ensor regularly visited Brussels, where, by 1885 there were sixty-four photography studios and by 1888, seventy-two.15 As these studios proliferated it was easy to find inexpensive and readily available photographic images in shops along Brussels boulevards or Ostend’s boardwalk, including panoramas and city views, portraits of artists, writers, politicians, and other prominent individuals alongside those of middle-class families, often presented in the affordable carte de visite format. Photographs were also used for instruction at the Brussels Academy where students including Ensor made copies using daguerreotype and calotype reproductions of fine art and architecture. Yet even with royal patronage and increased public acceptance, artistic use of photography remained controversial. By the 1870s Belgian painters regularly employed photographs to assist their practice, providing them with the immediacy of painting “before the motif ” with none of the inconveniences of working outdoors. Increased use and availability as well as a growing market for photographs had the inadvertent result of the general public demanding more detail and realism in painting. Yet this same public remained suspicious of how artists utilized photographs in the production of their work and questioned whether such work should be shown in public exhibitions. In Belgium, this debate over photography’s application grew quite heated in the late 1870s as artists went to great lengths to affirm that their paintings at the Salon were indeed paintings and not tinted photographs. The most famous of these cases involved the Antwerp painter Jan van Beers (1852–1927) who was accused by the critic Lucien Solvay of exhibiting painted photographs at the 1881 Brussels salon. After an unofficial jury examined one of van Beers’s paintings (Le Yacht “la Sirène”, or La Sirène) and declared that it had not been made from a photograph, van Beers sued Solvay for libel but his complaint was rejected by the Belgian civil court.16 These controversies did not settle the question of photography’s value as an artistic tool but did encourage artists like Ensor to view photographic images not only as mechanisms of science and observation but also as reproducible copies freed from reality and illusionism. As an invented, albeit mechanically produced image, the photograph was more about artifice and theater and thus quite ripe for artistic intervention. In addition to his teacher Edouard Dubar, Ensor’s most direct ties to photography came through his friendship with Théo Hannon. Through Hannon, Ensor met Félicien Rops (1833–1898), who, in addition to membership in the Société Libre and Les XX, was also a founding member in 1874 of the Belgian Association of Photography

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(Association Belge de Photographie or ABP). Rops actively championed photography in Belgium, creating promotional posters for Charles Neyt and the Dandoy studios and  in the 1880s reworking some of his lithographic prints using photoengraving process developed by Léon Evely. Along with Rops, another source for Ensor’s involvement with photography and possibly the author of some of the early photographic portraits of Ensor was Hannon’s younger brother Ėdouard (1853–1931), an engineer by training and another founding member of the APB, who worked for the Solvay Group all his life. Like many of his contemporaries initially attracted to the science of photography, in the 1880s Ėdouard Hannon began taking portraits of his family and later documented trips made to the United States, Russia, and Italy. Notable for their unusual and evocative compositions, dramatic lighting, and atmosphere, Hannon’s photographs emphasized the expressive possibilities of the medium and he later became a leading proponent of Pictorialism in Belgium. The Rousseau’s son, Ernest Jr. (1872–1920) is another possible source for Ensor’s photographs. Photographs served as resource material for several of Ensor’s self-portraits. The rather stiff pose in a drawing dating from 1878 now at the Art Institute in Chicago suggests a photographic source as does the medallion format so often found in carte de visite photographs of this time. A self-portrait (Figure  1.4) copied from a contemporaneous photograph (Figure  1.5) focuses attention on the artist’s facial features, adding more modeling and repetitive parallel lines that replicate the light and shadow contrasts found in the photograph. An 1883 drawing (Brussels, Private collection) depicts an equally formal Ensor seated in profile, a view that would have been difficult to reproduce looking in a mirror. Indeed, the overall effect of this drawing is more distanced and finished, quite different from the self-portraits that use a mirror as their source and often emphasize the process of making the image.

Figure 1.4  James Ensor, Self-Portrait, c.1883 Antwerp, KMSKA, inv. 2708/60, pencil on paper, 19.6 × 29 cm, (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Bruges, Hugo Maertens)

Figure 1.5 Anonymous, Photograph of James Ensor. c.1883, Antwerp, KMSKA (© KMSKA photo: KMSKA, Antwerp)

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With its unexpected and sequential viewpoints, even accidents of framing, cropping, and cutting, the photograph advanced a new understanding of the way modern selfawareness interacted with the private and public spaces of contemporary life. Taking in the world as a series of changing rather than fixed aspects, photographs, like mirrors, produced a disembodied and fragmentary view of the body, one that separated the image from any sort of illusionism, declaring instead the values of an artificial mode of production with its potency for invention. Etching, which Ensor began exploring in 1886, provided, as had the photograph and the mirror, a similar lexicon of graphic polarities and inversions once again encouraging him to see the pictorial image as constructed artifice. An 1889 etching in three states, My Skeletonized Portrait (T 67)17 (Figure 1.7) articulates the potency of Ensor’s play with notions of original and copy. The etching copies in reverse an 1888 drawing based upon a photograph of the artist in front of the Hannon/Rousseau home on the rue Vautier (Figure  1.6). In the photograph, Ensor stands outside, next to a window where Mariette Rousseau’s face can be seen in the window’s deep shadow. The print’s first state reproduces in reverse the photographic portrait of a tall, slender Ensor dressed in a jacket. In each successive state, Ensor burnishes away the face, replacing it in the last state with a skull that impishly still sports the artist’s beard and wavy hair, but whose eyes intensely inspect the viewer. He also transforms the window in the background, initially into a mirror-like surface and then, in the last state, inserting

Figure 1.6  Anonymous (Édouard Hannon (?)) Photograph of the artist near the Rousseau home (Rue Vautier?), c.1888 (© photo: Ostend, Mu.ZEE)

Figure 1.7  James Ensor, My Skeletonized Portrait, 1889, 1/3, etching, 11.6 × 7.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE, Inv. 1.412b (© Mu.ZEE, photo: Mu.ZEE, Ostend)

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a skeleton head for Mme. Rousseau. Unlike the Dance of Death images where the artist is confronted by a skeleton representing death, in this print, Ensor becomes the skeleton, his lively stance and piercing eyes appearing to honor the artist’s place, even as his face and physical body deteriorate. While the public meaning associated with this self-representation as a skeleton will be discussed below, it should be noted that in this print Ensor seamlessly merges his artistic practice and experiments with the etching process with his representation of contemporary social relationships and artistic identity. Allying the corrosive process of the acid bite with the natural process of decay, Ensor suspends himself between creation and destruction, life and death, all the while exploiting the possibilities of inversion and metamorphosis discovered in the chemical magic of printmaking and photography.

“Expressive” Interiors and the Social Self Along with publicizing his artistic identity, Ensor’s early self-portraits also initiate a conversation between the artist and his surrounding social milieu. Sometimes the closeness of Ensor’s face to the foreground plane implies an intimate exchange. In other self-portraits, the artist obscures his mirror source in a tangle of pencil and charcoal line. At times these dark and murky, nondescript surroundings seem to engulf the artist as he peers out from a corner of the room, pen and pad at the ready (1885, Brussels, Private collection) or looks up to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the fireplace (1886, Gstaad, collection Louis and Evelyn Frank). In this later drawing Ensor appears stooped, as if burdened by the surrounding space, but this perspective could also be the result of the artist trying to look, pose and draw at the same time. Some drawings explore the theatrical effect of artificial light on the environs: in one, his head and torso materialize from the darkness next to a gas lantern (1886, Brussels, RMFAB, Inv. 11.150) while in another, a lamp dramatically highlights the artist’s face as he scribbles the expression “Pas fini” (“Not finished”) in his sketchbook (Figure 1.8). Even if some of these dark interiors envelop him, Ensor does not appear as estranged from his surroundings but, rather, as a distinct and at times confrontational presence among the furniture and bibelots of the family salon. This juxtaposition of self and place comes together in two drawings, My Sad and Splendid Portrait (1886, Brussels, Private collection) where Ensor’s upper torso, face, and inquisitive gaze—again derived from a mirror—emerges from within a carefully rendered armoire cabinet. In Haunted Chimney (Figure  1.9), the artist’s face hovers in the mirror above the fireplace as if an eerie witness to the scene unfolding below, delineating his immediate and personal identification with his home environment. Haunted Chimney makes these associations particularly clear as, in addition to the mirror and the mantel with all its artifacts, Ensor includes his mother and sister in the scene even though they appear to be completely unaware of his spectral presence. Although the trace of Ensor’s associative drawing process is evident—he has reworked an earlier drawing of his family in the salon by adding his face—the resulting image is made up of disparate and disembodied fragments of observation that in turn make visible a new, more personal space of subjective imagining. But the link between

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Figure 1.8  James Ensor, Self Portrait “Pas fini” (“Not finished ”), pencil on paper, 22 × 17.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE, inv. 1961/659 (© www.artinflanders. be, photo: Cedric Verhelst)

Figure 1.9  James Ensor, Haunted Fireplace, 1888, crayon and colored pencil on prepared panel, 24 × 16 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy of the collector)

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personal identity and the interior envisioned here is neither private nor hermetic or the incarnation of narcissistic desire, for, as the women go about their daily routines below him, Ensor’s gaze remains steady. He does not look down at his family but out toward his audience, intent on engaging the world and the spectator beyond the frame. Observation and imagination merge in these drawings as Ensor’s presence forms such a symbiotic bond with the furniture, objects, and interiors that he cannot be separated from the milieu that surrounds him or defined without it. As he peers out in these drawings from mirrors, cabinets, curtains, and dark, lamp-lit interiors, Ensor’s mix of the familiar and familial affirms his middle-class status. At the same time, his fragmented apparition enunciates an emphatic dissidence, adding a note of discord and the insistent gaze of individualism to the seamless ebb and flow of these mundane interiors and the bourgeois life associated with them. Dramatic and assertive, Ensor’s bodily presence makes visible an acute self-consciousness, one that although submerged in these interior spaces addresses the world beyond the frame, articulating both his difference and steadfast belief in his importance. In other words, Ensor’s self-portraits are inescapably social. They mark off the domain of the self and simultaneously initiate a dialogue with the other—even if initially that “other” is the artist looking at himself in a mirror. This exchange explores a range of reactions and feelings. These self-representations might provide solace or be expressive of alienation or perhaps self-revelation—but primarily they describe Ensor’s social identity and intent to engage with his contemporary milieu. Ensor is not alone in his concerns or his artistic exploration of the self in private and public realms. Indeed, as the public sphere flourished in capitalist economies, artists found their identities increasingly circumscribed by interpersonal relationships and community, history, and the events of real time and space. The artistic understanding of what constituted the direct and honest depiction of personal vision and the inner self grew more complex even as the emerging methodologies of psychology and later psychoanalysis advanced the view that modern experience was increasingly neurotic. Realist and impressionist theory had promoted the central role of perception and individual temperament in the artist’s honest, direct observation from nature but with the rise of symbolist aesthetics in the mid-1880s, the means of expression as well as the manner and way that artists revealed their individualism and subjectivity occupied an increasingly central position in the discussion.18 While nature and the external world of phenomena had provided the Impressionists a primary source for interpretation, Symbolists drew from inner, personal experience and whichever technical and formal means necessary to make the representation and expression of the Ideal more visible. Whereas Symbolists viewed Impressionists as overly materialistic in comparison to their more emotional and internalized goals, both movements based their practice on lending visibility to subjectivity, making material, as it were, an interior state that the emerging field of psychology understood as real and worthy of expression. As the means to this expressive end, that is, as to how personal interpretations gave form to idea shifted from impressionist form to symbolist aesthetic, the social responsibility of art, implicit in the everyday commerce of the individual self with the world, became even more subsumed within individual expression. As the personal and subjective

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became recognizable as a more interior state of being, it found representation in images of the interior. These scenes, in turn, lent subjectivity a social role. Disembodied and fragmentary, isolated, and yet intimately intertwined with his surroundings, Ensor’s self-portraits describe and give form to this social space of contemporary experience both observed and imagined. Defined by an active and engaged process of invention and the performative continuum of looking and making, these self-representations acknowledge the personal and relative experience of time even as they undermine what constitutes pictorial reality. While they might be viewed as the artist’s private and personal exploration, they also deny any objective re-presentation. Re-working older drawings, adding or overlaying newer images, juxtaposing a range of techniques, and joining images without the hierarchy of spatial illusion or pictorial logic, Ensor, especially in the privacy of his sketchbook, reports on what he wishes to make visible. These self-portraits perform then as deliberate acts of subterfuge and self-fashioning that eventually when exhibited, could also serve as self-promotion.

Rebel with a Cause Even if the exact meaning of the inscription “Pas fini” that accompanies the drawing of the scowling artist in the self-portrait discussed above remains obscure, when combined with the artist’s intense, even adversarial regard, the words appear to be directed toward an implied audience and to refer to Ensor’s struggle against traditional and conservative attitudes. The words act as a sharp and caustic comeback, not unlike the sarcastic ending of “Three Weeks at the Academy” where rejected from the salon, the young painter joins Les XX, affirming his anti-academic, avant-garde status. This strategy—using sarcastic or satirical language to address his public—will continue throughout Ensor’s career, most especially in his socially engaged works of the late 1880s but appears first in his self-portraits. Due to their assertive posing and at times farcical playfulness, these early selfportraits also address Ensor’s desire for position and importance, serving in a way as auditions for the more public role he would soon assume. It is not until the mid-1880s, when his position in the Belgian art world becomes more established, that Ensor first exhibits his self-portraits. But this is not to say that Ensor does not find a way to be seen by the public. A Colorist (Plate 2), exhibited at La Chrysalide (1881), the Paris Salon (1882), and the first Les XX salon (1884) includes a self-portrait in a mirror in the left background. In this painting, as his self-portrait at the easel of the previous year, Ensor again presents himself as a painter at work in the studio with a model, his sister Mitche, posing as a fan painter amid props and furniture. Despite the ostensibly impressionist subject—an anecdotal slice of modern life—the real theme appears to be the art of painting itself. Brushes and a palette at the bottom right, diagonally opposite the mirrored self-portrait, serve as a repoussoir element, inviting the viewer to assume the position of the artist and metaphorically both behold and paint the unfolding scene. In this fashion, Ensor, acting as both subject and producer, engages his

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audience in a discursive exchange on the circuit of looking and rendering, process and expressive subjectivity that lies at the core of this painting, modernist aesthetics, and his own art practice. Other self-portraits more overtly promoted the artist and his identity and legacy especially to those attending Les XX salons. For the 1888 Les XX catalog where each artist designed their own page, Ensor included his self-portrait as a silhouette standing before an easel with a large palette diligently working on a painting (Figure  1.10). Near the handwritten list of works are several drawings that testify to his interest in Dutch art including a genre scene possibly inspired by Jan Steen. At the bottom of the page, almost as a coda, Ensor includes a copy after a Jacob Jordaens self-portrait signed with his initials, attesting to his artistic identification with Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists. Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (Plate 3) advances this kinship with Northern Baroque artistic traditions even further. Re-working a self-portrait from 1883 that accented his impressionist ties, Ensor added a scarf, feather, and a fancy flowered hat. With a three-quarter view similar to a carte de visite photograph and a circular format that resembles a mirror, Ensor’s head leans outward, his eyes boldly meeting those of the spectator, his pose that of a gentleman whose rakish hat and stylish mustache recall Baroque portrait conventions. Based on an engraving by Paulus Pontius (1603–58) after a 1623 self-portrait by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter-Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Ensor’s portrait testifies to his identification with Rubens as an Figure 1.10  James Ensor, Catalogue Page for 1888 Les XX Salon, ink, collage on paper, 48 × 32 cm, Ghent, collection Patrick Florizoone (© photo: Dirk Pauwels)

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artistic predecessor.19 Deliberate and not without ironic humor, Ensor’s proud, even flamboyant self-display echoes that of the Flemish master, his quotation of Rubens quite possibly a response to a critic who had mockingly labeled him “the giant of Les XX, the Rubens of Modernity, the Chief of our Neo-Painters, the Atlas.”20 As if a present-day Rubens, Ensor in this self-portrait is presented to the Belgian public as a dapper modern artist proud of his artistic legacy and Flemish identity. Flourishes such as the flowers in the hat and the brushy mirror-like surface also remind his audience of the portrait’s underlying artifice. As Patricia Berman notes, the hat Ensor wears also resembles the one Ruben’s wife Hélène wore in Hélène Fourment and Her Children Claire-Jeanne and François (c.1636–37, Paris, Louvre).21 Thus even as he pays tribute to Rubens, Ensor’s flowered hat also announces his creative affiliation with artifice, masquerade, and the feminine sphere. Ensor does not shrink from performing this burlesque travesty in public, showing Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat at the 1890 Les XX exhibition as My Disguised Portrait. By 1888 Ensor moves beyond descriptive self-representation to deliberate manipulation, exaggeration, and masking, declaring through performance and selffashioning the contrary trace of his subjectivity. Realism had taught him the relevance of personal interpretation in the representation of contemporary life as well as the need for art to be both socially responsible and have a public presence. Observing his own reflected and fragmented image in mirrors and photographs, Ensor recognized the radical expressive potential within these contrived and markedly public representations of the self where observation from life could coexist with interior states of being. At the same time, these self-representations, while offering a context for his individualism, also imbued his radical subjectivity with a public presence, one situated within his contemporary milieu, whether in the studio, the family home, or at the salons of Les XX. Intense and direct and often contrary and defiant, Ensor’s self-portraits also make visible his social engagement, arguing through their presentation for a broader purpose and social meaning. Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat enfolds the beholder in the drama of his social presence, demonstrating to the public beyond the frame the expressive and critical potential of travesty. Eleven years later Ensor reprises the pose and costume of Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat in his Self-Portrait with Masks (Plate 4). Like earlier self-portraits, Ensor once again appears as if in a mirror. Now sporting an elegant upturned mustache and beard and wearing a red hat festooned with flowers and a feather, Ensor looks out from the midst of a carnival crowd, his head and face turned toward his imagined audience, his searching eyes steadily returning their gaze. The faces that press forward and surround him are not from observation but instead accent an artificial space more often associated with theater and performance. Some of the faces are masks with various expressions; others are real but camouflaged, further enunciating the aspect of masquerade. Several have such exaggerated features and heavy make-up that, even if representations of actual faces, they are hard to distinguish from their masked neighbors. Despite careful modeling and scintillating color and light, this grotesque accumulation of masked and painted faces grows more stifling and oppressive with the masked figures seeming to jostle, push, and cram themselves into the foreground plane. The painting’s claustrophobic and somber tone is reiterated by the presence of

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several skulls in the background. Immersed in this multitude, Ensor appears to be but one more participant in a parade of artifice. Behind the artist still more masked heads, some in blackface, press forward. Filling in the background, this dense and seemingly endless throng of human masks (and one cat!) interrupted by the occasional skull, provides a chilling backdrop to Ensor’s carefully posed, even cryptic, self-portrait. Mouths covered with red lipstick open, doll-like eyes stare outward, empty sockets give way to a vacuous void as the burlesque crowd of masked heads surround the artist and press forward toward the beholder. Included in this gathering, Ensor plays a dual role: he is both a member of this parade and a keen observer, an aspect reinforced by his larger size and red hat, his steady regard, and his back turned away from the crowd around him. Yet even as he reprises the role of his earlier self-portraits, that is, as the intermediary between observable reality and subjective representation, Ensor provocatively invites his audience to compare his disguise with those surrounding him, proclaiming in the process his alliance with masquerade and performance. At the same time, by mixing his image with the masked figures, Ensor questions the very notion of portraiture as an act of self-conscious revelation. Portraying himself as a young artist when he was then nearly forty in a pose drawn from Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat painted fifteen years earlier, his frozen yet carefully considered facial expression projects a wariness reinforced by critical, inquiring eyes. Skewering intimacy, Ensor opts for a public image that is self-fashioned and completely contrived. This painting could serve then as a form of publicité, publicizing Ensor’s starring role in this carnivalesque parody. Announcing his place within the social space of travesty, Ensor affirms the strategies of subterfuge and performance, a perspective and approach that by the late 1880s had come to embody his art practice and which by the end of the century found its most confrontational and brazen manifestation in Self-Portrait with Masks.

The Intrigue of Masquerade From an early age Ensor was aware of the disruptive and subversive potential of roleplaying and the expressive potential of masquerade. Writing to a colleague in 1898, a year before he painted Self-Portrait with Masks, the artist recalled his childhood and the influence of his grandmother’s playful transgressions: My grandmother sometimes dressed me up in strange costumes. She also carefully dressed the ape, which she had taught hundreds of tricks. The mischievous creature was the terror of neighbors. She used to take it with her whenever she went for a stroll. She loved masquerades. I can still see her standing at the foot of my little bed one evening during carnival. She was dressed as a coquettish peasant with a terrifying mask. I must have been about five years old, which means she was well over 60.22

A mischievous pet monkey, cats, and squawking parrots provided a lively environment for customers at his grandparent’s shop on the Kapucijnenstraat and it was here that

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the adolescent Ensor first let his imagination mingle with the store’s collection of eccentric objects, Chinese porcelain, stuffed rare fish, seashells and lace. Strange yet stimulating, this place of childhood memory and fantasy remained important to the artist as he stated in this same letter: “There can be no doubt that these exceptional surroundings helped to develop my artistic faculties or that my grandmother was my great inspiration.”23 As these recollections suggest, Ensor associated dressing up in costumes and interacting with the public with imaginative play and contrary, even rebellious behavior outside of social convention. One of Ensor’s earliest self-portraits (1877, Tel Aviv, Fine Arts Museum) shows him performing in front of a mirror. Wearing a headdress that covers his head, leaving his face in shadow, Ensor impersonates an Arab, his facial expression exaggerated to imply intimidation or surprise. While this drawing describes a private fantasy acted out in the studio, more often than not Ensor’s performances were public. Numerous photographs document Ensor dressed in costumes for Carnival, playing the flute, the piano, and later the harmonium, or posed on the beach in Ostend with Ernest Rousseau Jr, as they engaged in mock battles holding skeleton bones. These images of Ensor in performance were no doubt important as he used some of these photographs as the basis for his paintings. Ensor also explored the expressive possibilities of dramatic narrative in his student sketchbooks with many drawings of costumes and figures posing. While some of these images are copied from illustrated journals, others could have been drawn from live performances that he attended. Ensor’s theatrical disposition is also evident in drawings Mariette Rousseau’s scrapbook (Brussels, RMFAB, Inv. 10290). Distortion, wordplay, odd juxtapositions, slapstick, and the absurd hold sway in these intimate souvenirs of the shared escapades of Mariette, James, and Mitche Ensor and their families. Intended as souvenirs recalling adventures in the woods and windy walks along the Ostend boardwalk, in each, Ensor plays a central role, his tall thin body, long coat, and top hat repeatedly emphasized. Some self-portraits are drawn as silhouettes, consisting of Ensor’s head often with a goatee in profile and a top hat above a skinny, almost skeletal body. Many of these drawings and silhouettes parody Ensor’s bourgeois status and bohemian posing with the artist poking fun at himself, his obsessions, and his ambition. Verhaeren seems to have agreed with this self-deprecating representation, preferring to recall in his 1908 monograph the memory of this younger Ensor—slender, tall and pale with large limpid eyes and long, fine, restless hands24—the same figure that also enlivens Mme. Rousseau’s scrapbook as a silhouette, and returns in 1899 as Self-Portrait with Masks. Ensor’s interest in the theater came from many sources. The annual Carnival with its parodic inversion of social codes and accent on the excessive body, the irreverent puppets of Brussels’s Toone Theater, and even the bawdry puns and silly pratfalls of traveling vaudeville acts all nourished Ensor’s appreciation for drollery, farce, contradiction, and disguise. Ensor’s contacts with theater came initially through his friendships with Edmond Picard, Théo Hannon, and the Lynen brothers all of whom were involved with contemporary theater. Picard, who wrote several plays and later won the national drama award for his play Ambidextrous Journalist, promoted Belgian theater initially in L’Art moderne and later at his Theater of the House of Art

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where Maurice Maeterlinck’s plays were first staged. While known primarily as a poet and painter, throughout the 1880s and 1890s Hannon found his greatest success as a playwright, writing many revues that played to responsive audiences at prominent Brussels theaters such as the Alhambra, the Royal Theater at the Gallery Saint Hubert, and the La Scala Theater. Hannon introduced Ensor to the brothers Amédée (1852–1938) and Armand (1849–1932) Lynen who were involved with theater, set design, and illustration. Amédée was also a caricaturist, illustrator and member of L’Essor art group. In the 1890s Amédée collaborated with Charles Vos (1860–1939) and Lucien-Joseph (Luc) Malpertius (1865–1933) on revues and spectacles staged both in Belgian theaters and at the Diable-au-Corps cabaret, several of which were written by Hannon. Ensor was also drawn to the long-standing tradition of artistic parody that permeated avant-garde groups in Belgium and France. Called zwanze (joke) in Belgium and best defined as performance-based satire where skepticism, critique, black humor, and pleasure conspired to undercut social hypocrisy and pomposity, this skeptical zwanze parody tradition continued in the 1870s and 1880s mostly at literary and artistic banquets, masked balls, and readings affiliated with artist’s cabarets and societies.25 Zwanzism appealed to Ensor’s sense of subversive play, and its spirit finds its way not only into his art practice, chiefly in self-portraits, but also in other activities such as his participation in the 1890s in the Diable-au-Corps cabaret in Brussels and the Rat Mort in Ostend. Most often Ensor used satire and black humor to disrupt the complacency he saw around him. In an essay on the artist in the 1898 issue of La Plume dedicated to him, Blanche Rousseau noted Ensor’s contrary and devilish attitude, and his desire to provoke. She recalled an evening when he was bullied by dinner guests into playing the piano: Then he rose immediately, marched to the piano and burst forth with a discordant fanfare, a tumult of jousting sounds, but so mocking, so violent, and so unexpected and tragically ironic . . . a sort of march of the bourgeois, where the cries of the animals mixed with the racket of the tom-tom and then broke into a long sinister howl. He returned to his place without his expression having changed, but the others did not laugh.26

As Blanche Rousseau suggests, Ensor assumes here the irreverent pose of a Belgian zwanze, deploying the same contrary and sarcastic stance he used in “Three Weeks at the Academy.” As that essay had made clear, from the very beginning of his art career, Ensor had discovered in parody and performance an effective and provocative way to stage his satirical critique. This strategy of performance, masquerade, and artifice that Ensor derived from his contacts with popular culture, burlesque theater, and zwanze parody resonates throughout his art practice, his essays, and even his puppet ballet, La Gamme d’Amour. But it would be in his self-portraits that Ensor most directly voiced his irreverent and satiric spirit. As if an actor on his own stage, in these self-portraits Ensor takes on a variety of roles and disguises, each of which empowers him and his radical subjectivity while simultaneously reflecting his relationship with his contemporary world.

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Master of Disguise By the late 1880s, staging and expressive interpretation become a central part of Ensor’s art practice as increasingly he performs his identity, using his imagination and role-playing to act out a variety of identities that establish his subjective presence while embodying his role and connection to contemporary Belgium. Freed from the limitations of description, Ensor utilizes whatever expressive means necessary to dramatize his ideas and social perspective. One of the artist’s earliest etchings, The Pisser (1887) (T 12) (Figure 1.11) succinctly visualizes this strategy of artful disguise and zwanze critique. A man, dressed in a prototypical top hat, long jacket, and pinstriped pants of the bourgeoisie, is seen from behind relieving himself against a wall, his patched and threadbare clothing and uncouth activity placing him on the margins of social propriety. To the figure’s right, the derisory “Ensor is a fool” (“Ensor est un Fou”) is scrawled on the wall along with crude child-like stick figure drawings. Although his back turned and his identity concealed, the top hat and prominent mustache suggest that this pissing man is the artist himself. Based on Amédée Lynen’s cover illustration for Théo Hannon’s Au Pays de Manneken-Pis (Brussels: Henry Kistemaeckers, 1883) which shows a worker similarly engaged, Ensor, as Lynen, links this figure to both Mannekin-Pis, the boy who according to legend used his urine to put out a fire that threatened Brussels and to Tyl Ulenspiegel, the hero of Charles de Coster’s book who showed his disdain for authority by pissing on his enemies.27 Inverting the insult—calling himself a fool—and including scatological references, anti-social behavior, graffiti (the stick figures scratched on the wall parody officious pipe-smoking academics) in this etching, Ensor portrays himself as the unruly hero Figure 1.11  James Ensor, The Pisser, 1/1, 1887, etching, 14.5 × 10.3 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.04911 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

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and natural fool of the Northern tradition whose marginal and satirical act of pissing promotes the irascible perspective of a zwanziste joke. In other self-portraits, some exhibited at Les XX between 1888 and 1893, Ensor assumes a variety of identities, some overt and some more disguised. He becomes Christ tormented by critics and tortured on the cross; he is prayed over by angels and bows in supplication to the Virgin Mary. In other paintings and drawings, Ensor uses surrogates: he is an insect and a fish, a Pierrot, a skeleton, and—as The Pisser acknowledges—a fool. He also represents himself cross-dressed as a woman and surrounded by demons. Each masquerade speaks publicly to the artist’s belief in his own importance and to his desire to be respected by his contemporaries. Enunciated as an empowered and expressive individualism, this carefully crafted self-fashioned performance supports Ensor’s critical and dissident stance, demonstratively marking his difference as both producer and participant in his own theater and his prominent role as a master of disguise.

Ensor as Christ Ensor is but one of many nineteenth-century artists who, inspired by modernist theory’s emphasis on the artist’s central role in mediating between materialism and an ideal or spiritual world as well as Romanticism’s cult of creative genius and the notion of the artist as a criminal or outsider, identified with and created self-portraits as Christ. This self-identification was aided and abetted by the significance assigned to Christ in contemporary society and daily life, especially in Catholic countries like Belgium, and reflected culturally in religious-themed imagery and narratives drawn from Christ’s life on view at national salons. In Belgium, religion and politics are inextricably joined, especially after the Catholic Party formed in 1869. The ensuing struggle for power between religious and secular parties dominated the political discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1884 until 1893, when Ensor makes most of his self-portraits as Christ as well as numerous paintings and drawings based on Christ’s life and other religious subjects while also producing some of his most socially and politically engaged work, the Catholic Party controlled the Belgian government. The Catholics, who believed in the authority of the Pope and a traditional interpretation of Christ based upon faith, strict doctrine, and the Sacraments, encouraged artists to make works that exemplified the conservative, ultramontane perspective by emphasizing Christ’s role as a spiritual leader and performer of miracles. Belgium’s anti-clerical Liberal Party, and especially its Progressive wing, denied Christ’s divinity, preferring instead to accent his humanitarianism and importance as a social leader. By the mid-1880s when the social narrative of Ensor’s work was at its most prominent, the Belgian Worker’s Party claimed Christ for their cause—presenting him as a Socialist whose life was that of good works and social reform. Ensor first portrays himself as Christ in his 1886 drawing Cavalry (Figure 1.12), based on Rembrandt’s etching Christ Crucified between Two Thieves (The Three Crosses (1653, Bartsch 78) as well Jean Portaels mural-sized painting of 1885 for the

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Figure 1.12  James Ensor, Calvary, 1886, pencil, crayon, and oil on paper, 17.2 × 22.2 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Private collection, Belgium)

Figure 1.13  Jean Portaels, Crucifixion, 1885, oil on canvas, 650 × 1000 cm, Brussels, St. Jacques Koundenberg (photo: © Brussels, KIK/IRPA: Commissariaat Generaal voor ‘s Lands Wederopbouw)

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Koundenberg Cathedral in Brussels (Figure  1. 13). Even as he retains Rembrandt’s central three crosses and the centurion on a horse, Ensor accentuates the public spectacle of the crucifixion, following Portaels’s model and the medieval/early renaissance iconographic tradition. In Ensor’s drawing, the crowd that surrounds the three crosses—figures wearing masks or with exaggerated facial features, horsemen dressed as medieval knights, and exotic “oriental” types sporting turbans, feathers, and long robes—allude, along with the exuberant arabesque lines and bright non-naturalistic colors, to the drawing’s underlying satirical impulse. Directed beams of light that resemble stage spotlights lend the scene a certain theatricality while also focusing attention on the off-center cross bearing the crucified Christ. Making it clear that the scene refers to present-day Belgium, Ensor includes Les XX’s emblem on the back of the man in the foreground. Like the Belgian public who saw this work at the 1891 Les XX exhibition, the viewer takes their place among the figures in the left foreground, becoming both a spectator and witness to the unfolding event. Continuing his contemporary references, Ensor replaces the traditional, mocking INRI (“Hail Jesus, King of the Jews”) inscription with his own name, ENSOR, printed in capital letters, openly publicizing his performance as Christ. Reversing the traditional placement of Longinus on the right side of Christ (found in both Rembrandt and Portaels versions) Ensor puts the Roman centurion on the left and remakes him into a comical, clownish figure, underlining the drawing’s parodic intent. This Longinus holds up a lance bearing the name of Ėdouard Fétis (1812–1909), who, in addition to his role as a critic for the L’Indépendence Belge, was also a conservator at the Royal Library and a member of the administrative committee at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. By casting Fétis, a known figure associated with the government, the museum, and the conservative status quo, as the centurion in this mock Crucifixion, Ensor lampoons official authority. At the same time, Ensor’s unfolding drama gains poignancy through its juxtaposition of satirical humor with more emotive and personal details. Indeed, on the right side of the Cross (where Longinus was traditionally placed) those attending the crucifixion react emotionally to the event. One woman covers her eyes while another looks at the centurion and others assume poses drawn directly from Ensor’s copies after Rembrandt. Placed near the center of the composition in Cavalry, this group also directly engages the beholder’s eye, their reactions a dramatic contrast to the rest of the crowd who appear caught up in the spectacle. Ensor reinforces both the pageantry and emotional flourish of the scene with blue pencil lines that transform clouds and the horsemen’s feathered headdresses into lively arabesques. A few notable red highlights confront this predominantly blue field, most noticeably in the three crosses and the letters of Ensor’s name. Although linked by these colorful embellishments, Ensor carefully distinguishes his self-representation and crucifixion from that of the other two nameless men on crosses. The lance bearing the critic’s jab might draw blood, but Ensor as Christ does not react. Instead, he stands proudly naked, his arms raised, his emaciated but unscarred body highlighted by lines suggesting beams of light and forming a halo around his head crowned with thorns. In this manifestly public and theatrical fashion, Ensor proclaims his public narrative of self-importance, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

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As if including the names of Fétis and Les XX was not enough provocation, Ensor alludes through Christ’s pose with raised arms to current debates in progressive and anti-clerical circles about Christ’s social mission and his human rather than divine nature. Earlier in the nineteenth century, it was believed that representations of Christ with raised arms (“bras étroits”) concealed hidden Jansenist symbolism.28 These same raised arms later in the century, when joined with the Realist technique, intimated a more Socialist agenda. These associations were certainly evident in Léon Bonnat’s intensely realistic 1874 Crucifixion (Paris, Musée du Petit Palais), whose Christ with raised arms elicited this response from the Positivist writer and critic Ernest Renan: Our Christ . . . is neither god nor prophet, he is a man. We wish him soaked in human Sweat, horrible like all those who suffer, like all the flagellated of his Kind, like all those abandoned under an indifferent sky. Soil him with mud, make his wounds bleed in the full light of day if you wish him to live; flay his knees, bruise his body, dirty those feet bloody from rude contact with roads at the edges of the cities . . . it is necessary that he rebel—because you can be sure of it, he is a rebel . . . the man palpitating and despairing that Bonnat cast upon his canvas crying in his own manner: Ecce Homo!”29

Like Bonnat, the Christ in Ensor’s Cavalry raises his arms in a gesture of defiance, one that affirms his radical position and status and links his realistically depicted body to martyrdom, unjust persecution, and resistance, in other words, as a more human, social embodiment of Christ. Underscoring his role as rebel and martyr, in Calvary Ensor’s brightly lit body stands out dramatically from the man with the Les XX emblem on his back and the foreground crowd who look onto the scene from the shadows. Juxtaposed with linear arabesques that mark the space of satire, this dialectic of light and dark, derived from Rembrandt, reflects Ensor’s association of light with both modernity and subjectivity. Ensor underscored his alliance of Christ with political and social dissent when he displayed this drawing at the 1891 Les XX salon, alongside two of his most provocative works, the etching Doctrinaire Nourishment and the colored drawing Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (like Calvary also on a prepared panel). These two works, discussed in Chapter  3, deploy satirical strategies of distortion, exaggeration, scatology, and direct address to comment on contemporary Belgian politics. While these works associate Ensor/Christ with the rewards of public service and sacrifice, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (Plate 1) returns the discourse to events that took place before Christ’s public martyrdom. In this painting, Ensor/Christ seated on a donkey participates in a large public procession. Filled with multiple and overlapping narratives that record Ensor’s artistic response to the Belgian public and his colleagues at Les XX, aspects that will be explored at length in Chapter 3, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 blends religious accounts of Christ’s public life with references to Ensor’s contemporary experience. With the same demonstrative theatricality of his earlier self-portraits, Ensor can now be seen at the center of the composition purposefully refashioned into a very public presentation of himself as a modern Christ immersed in his social milieu.

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure  1.14 James Ensor, Christ Mourned by Angels, 1886, black chalk on panel, 16.5 × 21.4 cm, Ghent, MSK (© MSK photo: MSK, Ghent)

As performed so spectacularly in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Ensor’s selffashioned body presents his social identity as an artist and engaged social individual commenting critically on his contemporary world. Whereas the Christ in Calvary bears only a general resemblance to Ensor, he is unmistakably recognizable in Christ Mourned by Angels (Figure  1.14). This drawing, also on a prepared panel, presents the artist’s fervent musings over what happened next in the crucifixion narrative. In the foreground lies a supine Christ in death, prayed over by three angels. Substituting his bearded face and for that of Christ’s and joining his signature to the crown of thorns nearby, Ensor conveys his identification with Christ’s suffering and its connection with the stark trauma of his death on one of the three crosses on the hill above, the same crosses also found in the contemporaneous Calvary. Usually portrayed without gender, the three angels who hover over Christ wearing chaste, high necked dresses, their heads crowned with saintly halos, seem feminine in appearance, with faces modeled perhaps by local Ostend women. Two of the figures look up, engaging our eye, but any association this reciprocal gaze might have with the natural world is countered by their clothing and wings that expand into decorative patterns of evocative undulating rhythmic line and flat shapes that recall illuminated manuscripts. Although the costumes make it difficult to prescribe any specific gender to these watchful angels, their attentive poses, caps, and hair align them with the mourning traditions historically associated with women. While once again making visible Ensor’s self-identification with Christ, Ensor’s recumbent body, with its flowing lines suggesting breasts and a swelling stomach, seems more feminine than masculine. The lower body and especially the genital region are covered with the folds of a loincloth, one that, rather than discretely veiling Christ’s sexuality, instead joins Christ’s body with the feminine, spiritual sphere of the consoling angels surrounding him. Yet even if Christ looks exposed and vulnerable in Ensor’s representation, this depiction of an emaciated, effeminate Christ also accentuates a more secular perspective on Jesus’s humanity and suffering while the inclusion of the praying angels adds a reassuring note of spiritual

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succor that foreshadows resurrection. At the same time, the nurturing presence of the praying angels references contemporary views of the sacred, ideal woman, an alliance of women, compassion, and spirituality that Ensor repeats in Virgin of Consolation (Plate 31) that likewise links the ideal feminine with the artist’s self-portrait. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jesus Christ’s body and its ties to maleness and masculinity had become a contested site for both religious ideology and representation. In his popular Life of Jesus, Ernest Renan downplayed miracles for a human and more socially engaged Christ. Renan’s description of a secular Jesus as a man of the people based upon historical interpretations of the Bible threatened to undermine traditional Christian belief in Christ as both a divine god and a perfect man. Christians differed on how this ideal of manhood would manifest itself in everyday life as the values of bourgeois masculinity such as social status, wealth, competitiveness, physicality, and aggressive sexuality conflicted with the traditional values of humility, personal holiness, good works, suffering, and submission that the gospels associated with Jesus. These concerns were especially strong in England, where writers like Thomas Carlyle promoted heroic manliness and Charles Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity” based on chivalry advanced the idea of a virile, athletic, “manly” Christ.30 Although influenced by Kingsley, Thomas Hughes promoted his idea of a modern Christ who balanced heroic virility with sensitivity and human compassion.31 But sustaining such a compromise was difficult as the virtues of sensitivity, self-sacrifice, and love attributed to a more humanistic Christ were also associated with pious femininity. Representations of Christ that incorporated the highest aspects of each gender also engendered a fear of effeminacy and anxiety over creating an over-feminized Christ. British painters like William Holman Hunt, Ford Maddox Brown, and John Everett Millais struggled in their work to maintain a delicate balancing act of representing a more personal, inclusive Jesus Christ whose message of compassion, love, and sacrifice would also correspond with an ethnic and historical Christ masculine enough to appeal to both the working class and bourgeois man. With his soft, vulnerable, underdeveloped body, wispy beard and long hair flowing into curvilinear patterns the Ensor/Christ of Christ Mourned by Angels obscures distinctions between masculine and feminine, hardly fitting the heroic, muscular model of Kingsley and Hughes. Rather than an ideal of manly physicality, Ensor’s supine, nonsexual and abject body acts as a reminder of Christ’s (and by implication Ensor’s) suffering while serving at the same time as an affirmation of the virtues of selfsacrifice and devotion allied with nineteenth-century constructions of the feminine. In a similar manner to the decoratively patterned bodies of the three angels, the passive, feminized form of Ensor/Christ’s body forsakes the material world and its pleasures for the intimation of salvation. At the same time, Ensor’s description of a thin, less physically developed Christ in this work as well as in The Rising: Christ shown to the People (1885) (Ghent, MSK) and Sad and Broken: Satan and his Fantastic Legions Tormenting the Crucified Christ (1886) (Brussels, MRBAB) is more reminiscent of Rembrandt’s representations of the Crucifixion and Lamentation and the works of Northern Renaissance artists like Dirk Bouts and Rogier van der Weyden. Like these Flemish and Dutch artists, in Christ Mourned by Angels, Ensor’s abject and feminized body posed in passive resignation and sorrow embodies the physical trauma of the

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Crucifixion even as the nurturing solace of the attentively praying angels signals the promise of spiritual transformation. For Ecce Homo (Christ and the Critics) (1891, Belgium, Private collection) Ensor, quoting Rembrandt’s etching, Christ Presented to the People (Ecce Homo) 1655 (Bartsch 77), becomes the suffering Christ positioned between two contemporary critics: Fétis (also seen in Calvary) and Max Sulzberger. Noose around his neck and Fétis’s pen transformed into a flowering thorn, Ensor as Christ imagines his persecution and crown of thorns, the oval suggesting a mirror reflecting reality. Even the title, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man)—the words of Pontius Pilate used to present Christ to his accusers—and also the phrase Renan declared in his discussion of Bonnat’s image of Christ, underline Ensor’s antagonistic relationship with the critical public beyond the pictorial frame. The range of poses—defiant, spiritual, misunderstood—in these self-portraits as Christ ally Ensor with the notion of the artist maudit, that is, the artist or “suffering poet” as alienated and isolated, possibly criminal. This romanticized view of bohemian life as an escape from often provincial and mundane middleclass life appealed to artists like Ensor, confirming their position as initiated, chosen one(s) with a direct connection to the spiritual. Associating themselves with the misunderstood Christ, many artists imbued their creative visions and self-representation with both spiritual and social purpose. The portrayal of the artist as an isolated visionary with a spiritual message became another avenue for fashioning a public image, one that played into and against popular perceptions of the modern artist as alienated and of Christ as a radical and revolutionary figure. This perception, fueled by romantic myth-making of the artist struggling against an uncomprehending public, also spurred artists to join together into self-sustaining exhibition societies and artistic brotherhoods for support like Les XX, the Nabi Brotherhood and the community Vincent Van Gogh hoped would join him at his yellow house in Arles. In Ensor’s case, this call for mutual aid among artists becomes somewhat ironic. Indeed, as will be discussed in the next chapter, Ensor was actively involved with exhibition societies that provided support, opportunities to show and sell work, and patronage but his self-image as Christ, especially in Calvary, reiterates his individualism and disaffection with mutual aid and collaboration, particularly with his contemporaries at Les XX.

The Fish, a Brush, the Skeleton and Pierrot As a witty double entendre for “Art Ensor,” the hareng saur was certainly a provocative choice for Ensor to use as his emblematic double. Assigned many meanings sacred, profane, and political in the nineteenth century: a symbol for Christ, a derogatory term for a policeman, slang for the phallus, and allied with Commune politics and subversive parody in Charles Cros’s popular and often performed 1872 poem of the same name, the hareng saur resists any fixed interpretation and instead opens the space to multiple associations and readings. Like his self-representation as Christ and other symbolic figures, the hareng saur/pickled herring serves as a motif that

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could self-consciously publicize Ensor’s social identity and articulate his destabilizing critique whether it be of Les XX or his contemporary environment. Certainly, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring (Plate 6) repeats this strategy on an intimate scale. In this painting, two skeletons pull at a pickled herring held in their mouths. On the right, a skeleton wears a jacket and furry Cossack’s hat, lending it military association and the aura of overbearing authority. The other skeleton wears the scarlet ferraiolo of a cardinal linking this figure to Catholic ritual and the Catholic Party then in power. These two appear to struggle with their meal, this hareng saur cannot be consumed—even by skeletons. Ensor insinuates that “Art Ensor” is impossible to digest, even as the desire for sustenance can never be satiated, a poetic doubling of parody and nonsensical paradox that calls to mind Cros’s transgressive poem. Ensor would reprise this juxtaposition of absurdity and satire in Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved) (c.1917–18, New York, Metropolitan Museum) in which the inclusion of his disguised self-portrait in a reproduction of Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring on the background wall, acts as a sign of his persistence and resilience during the difficult time of the German occupation of Ostend in the First World War. The pickled herring also figures prominently in two other paintings of the early 1890s: Still Life with Blue Pitcher (1891–92, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie) and Virgin of Consolation: While Still Life with Blue Pitcher lacks the satirical impulse of Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring or the severed head on a platter motif of Dangerous Cooks (Plate 5 discussed in Chapter  2), its inclusion of a disguised self-portrait in the form of a pickled herring, uses this vanitas metaphor to contemplate Ensor interaction with and presence in the physical world and his interest through the still life in the pleasure of material things, the passage of time, and his own mortality. A similar association can be found in Ensor’s Virgin of Consolation where in the foreground a pickled herring along with several brushes serve as a signature near a self-portrait of the kneeling artist. In a similar manner to the pickled herring, the brush acts as a provocative emblem for Ensor, and for some authors, a measure of artistic virility. Ensor includes a prominent brush in Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel 1890 (Figure 1.15), affirming his willingness to manipulate his self-fashioned image for promotional purposes. In this painting, Ensor presents himself to the public as a self-confident, refined bourgeois painter not unlike the French painter Edgar Degas whom he admired. Perched on a chair and wearing a long, dark coat and cravat tie, Ensor strikes an awkward formal pose with the strong right angle formed by his position repeated in the frames, panels, and paintings that fill the background. Holding a palette and single paintbrush with long, wavy bristles, Ensor pauses as if in mid-stroke to turn his head and gaze out toward the spectator with penetrating eyes and a guarded facial expression. The painting on the easel, a religious scene, possibly of Christ’s baptism, is visually linked to Ensor via the diagonal of the paintbrush, again underscoring the artist’s affiliation with Christ. Despite the intimacy and directness of his facial expression and pose, Ensor distances himself from his audience. Placing his selfportrait in the middle ground he renders the whole scene as if a mirror reflection signaled by the frame and the thinly painted statue in the foreground. While lending this self-portrait a contemplative, vanitas quality, the mirror reflection also affirms Ensor’s status as a modern painter, one who, as Baudelaire had asked, could distill

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 1.15  James Ensor, SelfPortrait in Front of the Easel, 1890, oil on canvas, 59.5 × 41 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

from the transitory and illusory both spiritual and social meaning. As the implement that produced this painting and as an extension of the artist’s hand, the brush, placed at the center of Self-Portrait at the Easel, plays a primary and interpretive role even as its placement near the loins and next to the palette and easel links Ensor’s creative activity with sexual vitality. The brush as a sign of Ensor’s artistic creativity appears again in his 1896 painting, now linked with another of his stand-ins—the skeleton. The Skeleton Painter (Figure 1.16), based on a photograph (Figure 1.17), depicts the artist wearing a blue suit, standing at an easel in his attic studio surrounded by his paintings. As he leans forward, his head, now a leering skull animated by piercing eyes, steadily gazes out at the viewer. While Ensor reproduces the studio contents, he has cleaned up the clutter and tilted the floor forward to focus attention on the artist at work. The disguised self-portraits found in Dangerous Cooks, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, and Calvary, can be seen behind the artist while the other paintings and prints inventory the artist’s interests and pictorial concerns including still life, landscapes, interiors, scenes from the life of Christ, and satires of contemporary fads, transforming the studio into a microcosm of Ensor’s contemporary world. One brush replaces Ensor’s hand at the easel, while two more emerge like a bouquet from his jacket pocket and another can be seen near his lower body—as again Ensor joins brush and the palette to connect his body with artistic productivity and virility. Although he paints himself as a skeleton, in The Skeletal Painter Ensor does not portray traditional Dance of Death scene of the artist confronting death nor does

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Figure 1.16  James Ensor, Skeleton Painter, 1896, oil on panel, 37.7 × 46 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens) Figure 1.17 Anonymous, James Ensor in His Studio, 1896/97, photograph Antwerp, KMSKA (photo: © Antwerp, KMSKA)

he present an allegory as had Léon Frédéric (1856–1940) who in Studio Interior (Figure  1.18) represents himself in the nude seated with a skeleton on his lap. Like Ensor’s painting, Frédéric’s five-foot-tall canvas contains erotic overtones that might be considered rather shocking due to the artist’s nudity if Frédéric had not also added occult references such as the stalks of corn and golden stars on the skeleton’s

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 1.18  Léon Frédéric, Studio Interior, 1882, oil on canvas, 158 × 117 cm, Ixelles, Museum of Fine Arts (© KIKIRPA, photo: Jean-Louis Torsin)

transparent gown. Even the expression written on the paper: “beauty and ugliness are conventions” and the artist’s palette in the foreground underscores Frédéric’s symbolic intent. Indeed, the whole image reads as the distanced reflection in the mirror with Frédéric representing the artist’s sacred and mystic quest to transform the material world into an idealized image. In comparison with Frédéric’s painting, Ensor’s Skeleton Painter is more straightforward, with the fully clothed artist in his studio addressing the public from the transgressive perspective of the skeleton underscored by the addition of other skeletons. A skull with a brush in its mouth, a succinct metaphor of Ensor’s artistic discourse, peers out from behind a painting while another uses the brush to tip the top hat off of the skeleton in the foreground, waging a campaign of playful disruption in the studio even as one more skull looks down on the artist. In this fashion, Ensor in The Skeleton Painter recasts the studio into a shop not unlike his grandparent’s store where he remembered farce and travesty co-existing with reality and where now the droll skeleton artist grins and shows off his many wares. Making their first appearance ten years earlier in the Halos of Christ series, skeletons continue to populate Ensor’s work over his entire career where, as I will discuss in later chapters, they take on a range of meanings and associations from Dance of Death moralism to the farcical satire like that found in Skeleton Painter. Yet, even if Ensor later became allied with the skeleton, his self-representation as one was much less common. Initially, Ensor linked the skeleton with death, drawing from the rich tradition of vanitas and pictorial reflections on morality such as he did in 1887 when

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­Figure 1.19  James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, December 25, 1887, ink on paper, 12.5 × 10.5 cm, Brussels, RMFAB, ACAB Inv. 5040 (photo: © KIK-IRPA)

both his father and grandmother died. Later that same year in a letter to Octave Maus, Ensor drew himself as a slender silhouetted figure in a long nightshirt accompanied by a tall skeleton wearing a cape and top hat (Figure 1.19). As he points toward a church steeple and a Christ-like figure who ascends into the sky, Ensor asks Maus in the letter below why he was not informed about the last meeting of Les XX. As the next chapter will discuss, this image refers both to Ensor’s personal situation, including his own illnesses and these deaths, and his professional relationship with Maus. But its tone of suspicion and anxiety is quite different from My Portrait in 1960 (T34), an etching he makes in 1888. In his letter to Maus, Ensor portrays himself as if at death’s door, with the skeleton pointing both toward the landscape and the spiritual redemption of Christ while, a year later, Ensor’s contemplation of death will result in a poignantly humorous etching in which he imagines himself as a decayed skeleton wearing red slippers. Although not labeled a self-portrait, Ensor once again appears as a skeleton in his drawing Skeleton Drawing Fine Pranks (1889, Paris, Louvre). Dressed in a suit and tie, Ensor peels away the skin of his face to reveal the skull beneath just as he had in his etching My Skeletonized Portrait of the same year. Ensor’s eyes look provocatively out at the viewer through the sockets as the skull doubles as a mask. Standing before a mirror like the one in his family home in Ostend, in Skeleton Drawing Fine Pranks, Ensor plays the role of a skeletal artist drawing the scene reflected in the mirror behind him–a promenade of men and women in fancy period costumes. The artist’s sensitive rendering and emphasis on the mirror reflection, coupled with another skull hovering above the vase to the right, endows the entire drawing with a reflective vanitas quality.

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Contrasting his skeletal image with fanciful images in the mirror, Ensor the skeleton/ artist becomes the mediator between art and life by rendering, as Baudelaire had asked, the ephemeral into the timeless through his artistic invention. In a letter written when he was seventy-four, Ensor reflected on human frailty, permanence, and the printmaking process: I am twenty-six years old . . . I am not happy. Ideas of survival haunt me. Perishable pictorial material upsets me; I dread the fragility of painting. Poor painting exposed to the crimes of the restorer, to insufficiency, to the slander of reproductions. Yes. I want to speak for a long time yet to men of tomorrow. I want to survive and I think of solid copper plates, of unalterable inks, of easy reproductions, of faithful printing, and I am adopting etching as a means of expression.32

This quote adds a different perspective to Ensor’s skeleton self-portraits, proposing that even as they connect Ensor to contemplation of death and transience, they also lay bare the essence of his artistic vision—seeking to see reality as well as what lies beneath the surface of appearances. Skeleton in a Mirror (1890, Antwerp, Private collection) affirms Ensor’s use of the skeleton as a disguise. The boney skull reflected in the mirror is surrounded by masks that both hang on the wall and emerge from behind a curtain. More skulls, scattered among the masks, once again contemplate the vanity of life, but at the same time, subterfuge and masquerade are equally at play. If art is to be about life and death and the everyday experiences in between as Ensor seems to be implying, then we should not forget that in its social aspect, life can also be about artifice, travesty, and disguise. Standing before the mirror, gazing back, or looking out from the easel, Ensor’s skeletons always address their public. More mordantly humorous than contemplative, their presence constant and immediate, we watch them act in a performance that joins the artist, even at his most skeletal, with the modern world. Ensor’s propensity for assuming different roles and identities, in a sense using his self-representation as a performance always with an eye on commenting on social aspects, also allows for a certain playful yet subversive freedom from inscribed and expected gender roles. In Call of the Siren (Figure  1.20), Ensor’s self-portrait, inserted in a recognizable yet contrary situation, is used to remark on both personal circumstances and contemporary social attitudes. The composition of Call of the Siren is based on a painting and print (and later a postcard) by Jan Van Beers titled The Timid One or Sea Bathing At Ostende (Figure 1.21), a mildly erotic and playful take on the fashionable fad of bathing that by the late nineteenth century had transformed Ostend into a beach resort. In Van Beers’s work, a young man in a bathing suit stands in the surf and holds out his arms, entreating the “timid one” of the title, a young woman wearing a somewhat revealing swimsuit to descend the steps of her bathing cabin and enter the water. Ensor’s version inverts these figures. Van Beers’s beckoning male is now a woman with raised arms whose dark belted bathing costume now emphasizes feminine curves and swollen belly. In his version, Ensor substitutes his own self-portrait for the shy female bather of Van Beers’s painting, even mimicking her pose of hands crossing the chest. While the revealing costume and exposed legs

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Figure 1.20  James Ensor, Call of the Siren, 1891/93, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

Figure 1.21  Jan Van Beers, The Timid One or Sea Bathing at Ostend (Aux Bains de Mer), 1888, photogravure after original painting, 31.5 × 25.4 cm (photo: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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of Van Beers’s timid swimmer are meant for voyeuristic titillation, Ensor’s bather with the same pose and simple pink striped bathing suit that now modestly covers the artist’s slender body becomes an exaggerated burlesque copy of Van Beers’s original. Indeed, the substitution of the woman inspires a double take, one that humorously exorcises Van Beers by pointing out that every copy is different. But the differences between the two works had other references as well. Ensor’s painting, originally titled Bathers, dates from 1891 and was quite possibly based on the Van Beers composition as the figure on the right initially had a woman’s face that Ensor later covered over with his own. Ensor also changes the title, perhaps as early as 1893 to The Call of the Siren. Although some authors believe the title alludes to Ensor’s friend, Augusta Boogaerts (1870–1951), whom he nicknamed “The Siren”, the painting is also connected to Van Beers in another way. In 1892 Ensor’s aunt and uncles, all owners of tourist shops in Ostend, are accused of copyright infringement for selling lithographic reproductions of The Timid One without permission. Although Ensor seeks Edmond Picard’s advice, eventually his aunt and other family members are fined and not allowed to sell this and other reproductions in their shops.33 Quite possibly Ensor reworked the painting after the copyright conviction, substituting his face and reversing the roles, thus making a painting that references van Beers’s painting a sarcastic inversion rather than a copy. At the same time. the new title, The Call of the Siren, refers directly to van Beers own scandal where, as discussed earlier, he was accused of submitting works that were not paintings but painted photographs to the Brussels Salon. Although Van Beers lost his libel suit, he embraced the notoriety and subsequently became identified with La Sirène. Van Beers became a well-known, successful, and rich artist and one who, given his legal battles, realized the value of copyrighting his work, especially when he began producing mildly titillating bathing scenes like The Timid One. With this history, Ensor’s painting can be considered a retort to Van Beers, with the substitution of his face over the woman’s serving as a sarcastic reference to how Van Beers’s La Sirène had been vandalized. At the same time, Ensor takes aim at the underlying sentiment of Van Beers image with its traditional gender roles and prurient voyeurism, all designed to attract the tourist market. While recognizable, Ensor’s self-portrait is demonstratively feminized, beginning with his repetition of the model’s demure, arms-crossed gesture, continuing with the stripped bathing costume whose shape and styling looks like a blend of male and female bathing suits, and ending with the artist’s dainty pose that mimics Van Beers’s timid woman. Given this satiric role reversal, the title seems ironic as in Ensor’s version, the Siren, that mythical female who lures men to their deaths at sea, has the same enticing gestures that Van Beers gave his male figure. The idea of her luring men seems absurd, even more so in Ensor’s version, as the one she beckons is the shy and modestly attired artist posed as a woman. Altering Van Beers’s flirtatious scene with ironic inversion, Ensor transforms a personal and family crisis into a biting and subversive bit of social satire, one that simultaneously critiques the idea of copyright by creating a rather absurd copy.

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Absence and Presence While Ensor often used his body or a substitute to comment on the quest for fame and the artist’s mediating role in contemporary society, he also uses his absence to make a similar point. My Preferred Room (1892, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art) articulates its self-representation through the display of the artist’s works, demonstrating his talent and range of subject matter from still life to social satire. The tall vertical format and pale blue colors of Isidoor Verheyden’s prominent portrait of Ensor (The Artist James Ensor, 1886, Ostende, Mu.ZEE) exhibited at the 1886 Les XX salon dominates the room, its pose and dress alluding to Ensor’s presence in this interior space. The room resonates as well with familiar items often found in Ensor’s paintings, drawings, and prints including a piano, armoire, fireplace, table, oriental vases, and even the family dog. Even more interesting are the works next to Verheyden’s painting whose arrangement acknowledges Ensor’s realist roots, his satirical and socially critical work, and several disguised self-portraits including Ecce Homo(Christ and the Critics), Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, and The Wise Judges. Although absent from the room, Ensor remains present through his works on view in this painting continuing, as he had with other self-portraits, his public role as artist and commentator. In these self-portraits, Ensor invents a public persona that represents both his personal perspective as an artist and his more public and social role. He uses a similar approach in an 1888 drawing that depicts the artist surrounded by monsters and demons (Figure1.22). The title, Demons Teasing Me,34 underscores the scene’s

Figure 1.22  James Ensor, Demons Teasing Me, 1888, Black chalk with black conté crayon on paper, 21.8 × 29.8 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Ada Turnbull Hertle Fund (© The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY)

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imaginative fantasy as the artist looks up while drawing himself from his reflection in a mirror. As he had with other self-portraits, Ensor describes his preferred representation, that is, as a contrary, bearded artist, dressed like a bourgeois gentleman, caught in the act of artful conjuring while surrounded by monstrous exaggeration. His flowing locks curl upward into sartorial nubs on his head while all around teasing monsters with snotty skulls, bulging eyes, and grimacing faces provide just the right mixture of caricature and absurd allusion to keep the scene solidly grounded in the carnivalesque. Ten years later, Ensor returns to this same image, albeit with changes that further emphasize his creative posing, now elongated into a vertical format, as a poster publicizing the artist’s first exhibition in Paris at the Salon des Cent in 1898 and as a cover for the special issue of La Plume dedicated to the artist. By then, this inventive entwining of fantasy and reality has become a well-versed strategy of willful distortion, a plan that, as the Chicago drawing makes clear, promotes Ensor’s satirical difference while simultaneously giving free rein to his wildly imaginative subjectivity. If Ensor’s disorienting world of artifice and spectacle might appear delusional to some, as this drawing suggests, the ruse is both provocative and purposeful, providing a steely, articulate, and compelling alternative view by an artist who insists on seeing his own way. As discussed earlier, in his 1899 painting Self-Portrait with Masks, Ensor performs his self-fashioned public self as a debonair bourgeois artist, his face but one mask in a field of masks, an artist who is part of his milieu and, in his backward gaze, a reflection of it. Even if, as this chapter has shown, Ensor continues to use contrived posing for self-promotion and social critique, by the turn of the century his position and social circumstance have changed. With numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and a major retrospective in Brussels in 1929, Ensor gains international recognition even as many of his paintings made after the turn of the century lose their earlier intensity and satirical edge. Between 1900 and 1930, he paints only a few self-portraits, along with reproductions of earlier self-portraits or inserts his image into a scene. His self-portraits from the 1930s and beyond continue to join Ensor with studio views or masks, but they no longer include the assertive regard, satirical attitude, disguises, or posing of his earlier self-representations. In Studio of James Ensor, 1930 (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) Ensor appears in the background as a distant presence framed by several doorways with many paintings, including Christ’s Entry into Brussels prominently displayed in the foreground. In another, Ensor in his Studio, 1932 (Aichi, Japan, Menard Art Museum), the artist, looking frail and diminished, is seated at his harmonium almost overwhelmed by the large painting. Interior with Three Portraits, 1938 (Brussels, Patrick Derom Gallery) follows a similar arrangement by inserting Ensor’s self-portraits into a view of the fireplace mantel with its clock, vases and masks, and reproductions of several paintings. By focusing our attention on the interior with an accumulation of objects, Ensor reprises an approach found in his early still life compositions, views of middle-class salons, and drawings such as the 1888 Haunted Fireplace where his face appears in the mirror among the bibelots on the mantelpiece. Now, however, the view is one of circumspect appraisal, with Ensor appearing in the upper right corner as a copy of one of his first selfportraits (Self Portrait at Easel) and on the far left in a profile view of his middle-aged

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head (possibly based on a photograph). These two self-portraits hover at the margins as if to frame the scene like bookends while at the center a frontal bust view of an older Ensor wearing glasses appears above a framed still life that looks like an extension of his body. In other works Ensor merges with his practice, appearing on the wall as a reproduction of an earlier self-portrait (Still Life with Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat, c.1930) (present location unknown (Tricot, no. 604)) or as a marginal participant. This joining of artist/self with studio/interior becomes all-encompassing in Point of the Compass, 1932 (Belgium, Private collection) a four-part crayon drawing which depicts the studio from the north, south, east, and west and includes both an early and late self-portrait. With its intimate proximity, shifting scale, and point of view, Ensor’s immersion in the studio is complete and the viewer’s perspective becomes that of the artist. These later self-portraits describe Ensor similarly: with a full white beard, wearing a dark suit or vest, and often a hat (sometimes festooned with a feather). In some works, he wears spectacles and is viewed in profile, but more often he returns the gaze, looking back at the viewer or posturing as if aware of his audience. He includes a palette in most of these paintings and often holds a brush and he is usually surrounded by copies of works or a pastiche of his subjects including masks. These works portray Baron Ensor, the now established artist who spends more of his days in Ostend receiving visitors or walking on the boardwalk than in the studio. In their repetitive treatment, themes, and dull palette, these later self-portraits seem emptied-out, drained of the assertive, performative self-fashioning of the earlier work, and while mindful of the language of artifice and satire, they retain little of the self-image so consciously constructed in Ensor’s quest for presence and place. Moving from the early self-portraits that describe the artist within natural ambient light and the interior spaces of the home to later images where he emphasizes artifice, subjectivity, and the artist’s central position in interpreting reality, Ensor’s selfportraits define his interpretive and expressive role as a modern artist. In these works, Ensor establishes his identity and place before the public while also affirming that identity can be constructed, modified, and utilized for both expressive intent and self-promotion. These representations, often drawn from the discourse of theater and popular culture, effectively describe the world as one of appearances, and selfidentity as multiple selves defined within this social exchange and capable of being fashioned into a public performance of expressive subjectivity. This strategy works for Ensor throughout his career, until, as his late self-portraits demonstrate, he no longer can claim the position of an outsider artist whose work observes, comments upon, or critiques his contemporary social milieu, but rather, as a successful, famous artist, he is left to reenact the memory, drama, and glory of his youth.

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Me and My Circle: Ensor’s Social Network

Late in his long life, Ensor painted Me and My Circle (Figure  2.1), his self-portrait as a white-haired gentleman gazing contentedly out toward his public. Encircled by masks, exaggerated faces, a few nudes, a parrot, a small figurine carrying a garland of flowers and other creatures, this image of a confident artist surrounded by references to his subject matter and milieu is quite different from the self-conscious and often confrontational self-portraits discussed in the last chapter that Ensor made at the beginning of his career. By the time he created Me and My Circle, Ensor was an internationally recognized artist who regularly received artists, writers, and dignitaries at his home in Ostend. One of the most famous of these occasions was Ensor’s meeting with Albert Einstein in De Haan on August 2, 1933. Although his art production diminished to only a few paintings a year—often copies of earlier work—Ensor enjoyed fame and its accompanying accolades including invitations to banquets (where he would usually give a speech), election to the Order of Leopold (1903) and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1925), membership in the French Legion of Honor (1933), and an honorary title of Baron bestowed on him by the Belgian King Albert (1929). This chapter considers Ensor’s contemporaneous social and artistic milieu, network of social relationships and ever-expanding circle of family, friends, supporters, artistic colleagues, and rivals that inform his art practice and the public discourse of his work. These associations and relationships along with the personal, critical, and financial support they provided, especially during the early part of his career, are instrumental in the development of Ensor’s creative practice. Most immediately, this community provides the artist sitters for his portraits and models for his paintings and drawings, making the social circumstances of his experience more visible. As well, the material presence and familiar intimacy evident in many of these representations attest to the significance of personal relationships to the artist and the important role this emotional and financial support from the community played in Ensor’s quest for recognition and success. Like his self-portraits, Ensor’s choice of subject and examination in his early career of realist/impressionist technique, while continuing his ongoing engagement with modernist theory, also gives voice to the values, perspective, and experience of his social standing. Although less examined in the scholarship of Ensor’s career, this aspect

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 2.1  James Ensor, Me and My Circle, 1939, oil on panel, 30 × 24 cm, Belgium, Private collection (photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

of sociability, that is, the individuals and groups moving through his social network and the exchange, considerable dealings, interaction, and responses between the artist and the varying communities of his contemporary milieu will be explored here and continued in Chapter 3 through a critical examination of the social themes in Ensor’s work. Rather than the often-repeated view that Ensor is an artist alienated from his contemporaries—a representation that allies him with romantic and modernist concepts of heroic individualism—this discussion presents an account of an artist and art practice completely engaged with his contemporaries and present-day world.

The Social Space of Ostend The city of Ostend located on Belgium’s north coast served as Ensor’s first community and the one he remained associated with throughout his life. As a child and teenager, Ensor witnessed the transformation of Ostend from a fishing village and port into a  popular and fashionable resort due in part to royal patronage, beginning with Leopold I who built a casino and theater there. The local economy was stimulated further by the completion in 1838 of the Brussels—Bruges—Ostend railroad line that joined the coast directly to the capital city and connections across the whole country. This rail link established Ostend as a tourist destination, enabling the upper middle

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class—especially after a reduced fare for pleasure trips was initiated—to spend money and enjoy their leisure time at the beach. Other factors that encouraged tourist travel included the establishment of the Ostend—Dover boat ferry in 1846, linking the railroad to London that by 1870 had doubled the number of passengers who traveled England and stopped off in Ostend for shopping, and the opening of new railroad lines between Ostend and Tournai, and Ostend and Paris in 1868 Leopold II, who also made Ostend his summer home, continued to develop Ostend, some of it with money from the profits he made from the Congo. He bought up large parcels of land along the shore and built a new Royal Chalet to replace the smaller one built by his father. He tore down the old Casino in 1877 replacing it with a new one in 1878, and then joined the Casino to the rebuilt boardwalk with a grand gallery in the neo-classical style, along with a park, and thermal baths modeled after the English spas and the Wellington Hippodrome. Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s, Ostend, at least in the summer when the population more than doubled, was the fashionable destination of choice for Leopold II and other European royalty, tourists from England and Europe as well as Belgian’s entrepreneurial middle class who, like the others, had the discretionary income and leisure time to gamble, attend concerts at the Casino, or promenade along the boardwalk and its side streets, stopping at the numerous souvenir and curio shops interspersed among the hotels and villas that now faced the sea. Successive cholera and tuberculosis epidemics in the 1870s and 1880s had raised health and hygiene concerns, and soon the restorative cure of dipping in the waters of thermal baths and the North Sea sent even more “health tourists” to Ostend’s hotels and spas. With the town now oriented to the sea and beach, many Ostend merchants and shopkeepers relocated their businesses to take advantage of tourists strolling along the boardwalk. Ensor’s family, who operated a small hotel and several souvenir shops, benefited from the city’s development. In late 1875 or early 1876 they moved one souvenir shop to a newly constructed building at 23 Vlaanderendreef (Allée de Flandre), a prime location between the old casino and the marketplace, guaranteeing foot traffic and shoppers. Eventually, the family took up residence in the rest of the rented building, living on the second floor, and letting out rooms on the third. The fourth-floor attic, originally servant’s living quarters, became Ensor’s studio. Once he moved to this studio in 1876, high, perspective views of Ostend rooftops begin to appear in his paintings. Ensor’s early work contains little reference to this real-estate speculation however, or the important role tourism played in the family economy. Fort Wellington and Fort Napoleon, both from 1876 (Ostend, Mu.ZEE, inv. 1956/169 and 1956/162), describe the remaining fortifications around Ostend while Villa Albert, 1876 (DeVuyst Gallery, Lokeren, BE, sale 180 October 23, 2021), depicts one of the luxurious villas then being built along the shore. Only one early painting acknowledges the presence of the king and his family, The Old Window in the King’s Stables (present location unknown (Tricot, no. 60)). Ensor’s first paintings from his teenage years are most often nostalgic and picturesque views of the old port, fishermen, and boats or local views of the sea, dunes, marshes, windmills, and farmland observed directly from life and painted in a realist style. While these landscapes and cityscapes map out the parameters of Ensor’s

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immediate social milieu, recorded in the geography of his hometown, it would not be until 1890 that Ensor would comment on the effects of the tourism industry that sustained his family and his artistic career with his boldly drawn and pointedly sarcastic and humorous view of his hometown, Baths of Ostend, a work that will be discussed in the next chapter.

The Social Space of Home Ensor’s early portraits of his family—his younger sister, Marie (Mitche) (1861–1945), mother Marie Louise Catharina Haegheman Ensor (1835–1915), her sister Maria Ludovica Haegheman (1839–1916), his maternal grandmother Marie Antoinette Henriette Hauwaert (1807–1887), and father, James Frederic Ensor (1838–1887)—make visible, as do his depictions of the family home, his deep rapport with his surroundings. Constituting Ensor’s immediate circle, his first community, these representations of his family describe in intimate proximity the social space that defines Ensor’s identity and circumstance as he initiates his exploration of modern bourgeois life. Ensor’s only known painted portrait of his father presents James Frederic Ensor (Figure 2.2) as a bourgeois gentleman dressed in a dark blue suit and seated in a stuffed armchair in a corner of the family salon, framed on one side by the fireplace and on Figure 2.2  James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist’s Father, 1881, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography)

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the other by a window. Absorbed in reading what looks like a pocket novel, the senior Ensor’s bearded face gazes downward precluding any sharp observation of individual details or expression. While Ensor keeps the viewer at a distance, what is apparent is the air of calm decorum that envelops the sitter in an aura of filial respect. While describing James Sr.’s presence in the family salon as solitary and contemplative—possibly he is shown relaxing at home on a Sunday—the painting disavows any association of its sitter with his occupation as a shop owner. Ensor’s recollections stressed his father’s status, sophistication, and intellect: He was a cultured man and spoke several languages, very handsome and tremendously strong. He always held his head upright and his demeanor radiated majesty. For me, there was something awe-inspiring about him. He was really a superior being.1

In his autobiographical “My Life in Brief,” however, Ensor suggests his father’s lessthan-pleasant demeanor and that his black boots inspired “fear and terror”.2 Frank Patrick Edebau, citing Ensor, offers another, darker narrative, closer perhaps to home: “He was really a superior man preferring (quoting Paul Claudel on Verlaine) to be drunk rather than be like the rest of us.”3 While this portrait seems to embody Ensor’s remembrance of his father as a cultivated intellectual and bourgeois gentleman of leisure, it also covers over a troubled family dynamic and the actuality of the elder Ensor’s peripatetic life. James Sr.’s marriage certificate lists him as a civil engineer and resident of Brighton, but where he studied or how he came to this occupation is unknown. Although he took courses in medicine for one year at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, James Frederic did not study at the Heidelberg University or even at the University of Brussels, as some have suggested, nor did he continue his apprenticeship with an engineering firm in London. After James Sidney’s birth in 1860, the senior Ensor may have traveled to the United States in search of a position as a civil engineer but was thwarted by the outbreak of the American Civil War. Ensor later claimed that this disappointment along with the hostile and closed Ostend community led to his father’s decline into alcoholism. Yet, like the scarcity of details surrounding James Frederic Ensor’s education and occupation, the circumstance of Ensor’s father’s ability to support his family suggests that he is not often able to work. Since, as was typical of this time, only men have the legal right of ownership, Ensor Sr oversaw the souvenir store that was part of his wife’s family business enterprise. Yet it was the women of the household, Ensor’s mother, Marie Catherina, and her sister Maria Ludovica (“Aunt Mimi”) who did the ordering and worked in the store. Even if Ensor Sr had little to do with the day-to-day running of the shop, he had difficulty managing the business. In 1875, when Ensor was fifteen, the senior Ensor was declared in default of his debts as the souvenir business failed to make a profit. After a ruling of the judicial court, the Ensor family declared bankruptcy, and the court ordered them to sell some of the furniture and other possessions to pay off debtors.4 After the bankruptcy, all financial matters were put in the Haegheman family name, with Aunt Mimi in charge of the family finances

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including paying the rent for the family home. The fine furnishings that Ensor includes in his family portraits and paintings of domestic interiors were either leased from the building’s owner, Mr. Rosen, or supplied by his aunt, who regularly imported luxury commodities including vases and decorative objects for the family’s shops. As well, to make ends meet and to take advantage of the summer influx of tourists, the family regularly rented out rooms on the third floor of the building. In June 1875, a few months before the bankruptcy, James Ensor Sr.’s father-in-law, Jean Louis Haegheman, died, and the following year his mother-in-law (Ensor’s grandmother) was committed to an asylum in Bruges. These events may also have contributed to the family’s financial problems as did the economic slowdown and recession of these years. The public bankruptcy and subsequent loss of family possessions and prestige in the small Ostend community likewise increased family tensions. After Aunt Mimi (who shared ownership of the business with her brother and father) took over the finances and operation, the stores become profitable enough that Ensor could attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels two years later in 1877. Whether or not Ensor’s father could support his family in the approved manner of the socially conscious petite bourgeois family he had married into, to his son, James Sr. embodied the life and style of the literate elite, a world of art and culture that James Sidney sought to be a part. Even if Ensor later blamed the hostility of the Ostend public for his father’s alcoholism, the senior James Frederic’s difficulties in sustaining a career and the public bankruptcy suggest that already in the 1870s he was a heavy drinker and not often at home. Correspondence between Ensor and Mariette Rousseau after Ensor returned home from his studies in Brussels pointed to a strained family dynamic as do accounts of violent episodes. In one letter Ensor described an incident where James Frederic had been beaten by locals and brought home by the police bloodied with his head split open.5 By 1885, the situation at home had become extreme. The senior Ensor was committed to an asylum—a common treatment for alcoholism at this time—and taken from the home in a straitjacket. In an undated letter to the Rousseaus, Ensor describes his father’s state: “He is as mad as a hatter and can’t be let out of his straitjacket. . . .  We can’t go and see him. We are trying to get him into a hospice, for if he stays in Ostend he will get himself knocked out again or drown himself in jenever.”6 Although James Frederic was later allowed to come home for visits, as Ensor reported to Mme. Rousseau, when he was not there, the house remained peaceful and calm.7 Ensor’s only other representations of his father are several 1887 drawings made after his death at the age of fifty-two, two months after the passing of his maternal grandmother in February. Although these drawings (and later print) of his father on his deathbed portray him as if asleep, the circumstances of James Sr.’s death on April 14, the day after his son’s twentieth-seventh birthday remain unclear. Even though he told the Rousseaus that his father had suffered a stroke and died at the foot of his bed,8 the death certificate states that he was found dead on a street in Ostend and an official police report suggests that it was not a natural death. This intermingling of personal and social circumstance in Ensor’s portrait of his father can also be found in his depictions of other family members. Although Ensor’s maternal grandfather and four uncles are all involved in the artist’s everyday life and

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the family business of souvenir shops and tourist hotels, Ensor does not paint their portraits. Rather, in this early period of his career, Ensor mainly depicts the female members of his immediate family—his mother, grandmother, maternal aunt (who lived with the Ensor family during the winter months and moved in permanently in 1908), and his sister. Ensor makes several formal portraits of these women in the early 1880s. The artist’s mother, Marie Catherina sits for her portrait near an easel and canvases in the dark interior of the artist’s studio in an 1882 painting (Figure 2.3). With pursed lips and an indirect, slightly impatient look, Ensor’s mother avoids her son’s gaze, her expression reflecting perhaps the tedium of posing. Dressed simply, even soberly in black, hands folded in her lap, her shoulders covered with a large white lace shawl decorated with three flowers, Mme. Ensor’s comportment, posture, and clothing embody middle-class propriety. Her class status is even more defined in an 1885 drawing (Brussels, RMFAB, inv. 11149). Shoulders once again covered with a lace shawl, she sits with the family pug dog on her lap in the same corner where Ensor’s father sat reading for his 1881 portrait. Ensor pays great attention to the play of light and shadow on the shawl. This wrap, her pose, the curvilinear arms of the chair, and the tactile treatment of the drapery, along with the detailed description of the room’s light-filled ambiance, all lend the portrait an air of stately refinement and bourgeoisie respectability.

Figure 2.3  James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1882, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© Brussels, RMFAB photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography)

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 2.4  James Ensor, Woman with Blue Shawl, 1881, oil on canvas, 74 × 59 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Rik Klein Gotink)

The Woman with Blue Shawl depicts Ensor’s maternal grandmother MarieAntoinette Henriette Hauwaert (Figure 2.4) seated in the same corner chair as both Ensor’s mother and father, no doubt a favored spot for portraits due to the direct light entering from the window. Whereas Ensor portrays his father actively reading and his mother looking distracted as she pets her dog, Mrs. Hauwaert appears to emerge from the shadows, the light from the window modeling her form by highlighting her hands, face, blouse with a black bow, and blue shawl. Ensor remembered his grandmother for her strange costumes, her flamboyant personality, and habit of walking around with a monkey. In this portrait, however, she is portrayed as a rather dark and somber presence like that of Ensor’s portrait of her daughter, Maria Catherina. In another drawing dated 1887, the year of her death (Present Location unknown, formerly Turske&Turske, Zurich), Mrs. Hauwaert, wearing a hat, her eyes distracted and unfocused, sits with her arm resting on a table. Ensor once again pays attention to posture and pose but even with this subtle rendering, the grandmother’s disoriented gaze, seen in both the painting and drawing, provides evidence of the physical signs of the mental illness that led to her commitment to the asylum at Saint-Julien in Bruges in 1876. By the mid1880s, however, she is well enough to visit the family home and sit for this portrait that glosses over any illness or quirky costume and instead represents Mevrouw Hauwaert as an old, conventional, middle-class woman. Ensor’s sister Mitche also makes frequent appearances in his early work. She is the focus of his first exhibited painting A Colorist (Plate 2) set in Ensor’s studio where her

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activity of painting a fan intimates a shared artistic ambition between siblings. Other depictions of Mitche allude to the family’s social status and the daily experiences of petit-bourgeois women. An intimate sensitively rendered impressionist portrait from 1883 (Belgium, Private collection) presents Mitche as an elegant bourgeois woman wearing a white gown decorated with a floral bouquet. Seemingly unaware of the viewer’s (and Ensor’s) proximity, Mitche looks out, her momentary pose offering in its close regard a familiarity quite different from the artist’s formal portraits of his mother, grandmother, and father. Ensor portrays Mitche as outgoing and culturally engaged, often accenting her literacy and creativity. In an early large-scaled highly finished drawing dating from 1881, for example, Mitche wears a fashionable day dress as she reads a book (Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago) while in Woman Writing a Letter (1883, Ostend, Mu.ZEE) she sits at a table, her head bowed as she composes a letter. Ensor’s Aunt Mimi, seen in most drawings either sewing or sleeping, makes fewer appearances, her busy schedule as the principal proprietor of the family’s shops no doubt making her less available as a model. In one detailed drawing (Figure  2.5), Mimi sits with her sewing by a mantle near a vase and elaborate candelabrum while behind her decorative objects and a painting, perhaps another Ensor portrait, can be seen hanging on the wallpapered wall. Placing his aunt in this bourgeois interior surrounded by decorative objects, Ensor reinforces an image of feminine domesticity even as this accumulation of things also alludes to Maria Haegheman’s work as a buyer

Figure 2.5  James Ensor, Portrait of My Aunt (Mimi), 1886–88, conté crayon on paper, 29 × 21 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens)

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for the family stores in Blankenberge and Ostend. In other drawings, she is sleeping or taking a nap with Ensor more than likely taking the opportunity to make a quick sketch of this woman who worked every day except Sunday. As a later portrait with the title Surly Countenance (1890, Belgium, Private collection) suggests, Aunt Mimi could appear as a rather stern and foreboding presence. Mimi’s intense regard and the lowered viewpoint in this work make evident her dominant position in the household but by including flowers and a mask that resembles a death head in the background, the painting also takes on a certain vanitas aspect, one that treats its subject in an iconic, symbolic fashion. At other times, Aunt Mimi becomes the subject of Ensor’s fanciful rebuke. Both his aunt and mother appear in Sloth or Laziness (La Paresse) (1888–89, Belgium, Private collection) where the artist’s exaggerated rendering hints at satire with Ensor making his humorous, moralizing point at their expense. But the title’s allusion to the seven deadly sins can only be ironic, perhaps a sarcastic projection of Ensor’s prickly view of his familial circumstance, as Aunt Mimi’s business acumen and success running the family shops hardly suggests laziness. Similarly, the artist’s 1888 drawing of droll grotesque monsters bothering his slumbering entrepreneurial aunt (Brussels, RMFAB, inv. 11154) is equally informed by Ensor’s ambivalence toward his family’s social status and the very family enterprise that supported his art practice. Like other petite bourgeoisie, the Ensor/Haegheman family depended for their livelihood on retail trade from tourism and the discretionary income derived from sales to the haute-bourgeoisie and vacationing upper classes. The downturn of the 1870s recession had brought financial stress to the family businesses and as the bankruptcy made clear, their middle-class status was neither assured nor constant. No doubt the bankruptcy and subsequent re-organization of the family finances increased concerns about the family’s standing in the local Ostend community, especially when the proceedings were announced in the local paper.9 Although the Ensor family’s subsequent move provided a place to live and work and the family souvenir business was doing better financially by the 1880s, living in a rented house with furnishing they did not own lends another perspective to the narratives of middle-class propriety and the social spaces of bourgeois domesticity portrayed in his paintings of the family salon. Even as their numbers expanded with the growth of the economy in the latter half of the century and the prospect of social mobility increased, the social and economic positions of the petite bourgeois in nineteenth-century Belgium remained tenuous. Only slightly above the lower and working classes in status, but not in any measure as well off as their middle-class affiliation might suggest, and indeed often in fear of slipping downward once again, the lower middle class in Belgium were perhaps more concerned with propriety, privilege, and appearances than their haute-bourgeois counterparts. No wonder then that this group sought proof of their status, success, and social position through the public display of material possessions and dress—the very attributes that Ensor includes in his representations of his family members and depictions of the family home. Undoubtedly, the Ensor family’s reliance on the continued prosperity of the middle and upper classes for the family’s status and financial stability was ironic

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and even somewhat frustrating for Ensor. As he wrote in numerous letters to his friends over the years, with responsibility for many administrative details such as finding assistants for the shop, paying bills or renting out rooms, and work in the souvenir shop in the summer kept him away from the studio and, as well, he was often distracted by concerns about the family’s material circumstances, especially after his father died. For Ensor, then, the yoke of family responsibility was never far, keeping him at home with limited possibilities for subjects and frustrating his desire for a career and success that he saw was possible when he visited or was living in Brussels. Indeed, even though he sold paintings and especially prints from the mid-1890s onward, Ensor was never able to become completely financially independent from his family or to support himself as an artist and was continually in search of new ways to market and sell his work. Indeed, despite his time there, Ensor never painted the interior of the souvenir shop, even though his numerous still-life paintings of seashells, chinoiseries, and masks could be regarded as references to the shop, albeit now arranged and under his control within the confined space of the studio. As well, even if Ensor is obliged to assist with the family business during the summer tourist season, he also has space in the home for his studio and plenty of high-quality art supplies. As well, if the amount and level of his art production can be measured in terms of time to paint and draw both at home and around Ostend, Ensor seems to have been more often in the studio or painting outdoors than in the shop, especially during the off-season. Despite the interruption to his studio practice necessitated by working in the store, keeping stock of the supplies, and bringing merchandise to the Blankenberge shop, the family business also ingrains in Ensor a mercantile mentality and work ethic that he upholds throughout his long life. Sales and marketing provide a way to measure and account for his success as an artist. Indeed, as he continues his art career, Ensor is always attentive to the business of art—exhibiting, making prints to sell, contacting potential buyers, and promoting himself in numerous ways. This same awareness of the bottom line and taking stock also finds reflection in Ensor’s careful account of his artwork in his correspondence, notebooks, and in the Liber Veritas (Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, inv. 1955.1021). This hand-drawn inventory of paintings with both sketch and dimensions provides a record of a practice by an artist who has spent a large part of his life taking stock of merchandise. Ensor’s sketchbook drawings describe the family home and those who occupy it. In many of these sketches, especially those made after 1885, Ensor’s sister, mother, and aunt are often surrounded by vases, lamps, decorative objects, and furniture. In some, the women seem hemmed in, completely immersed in these interior spaces. In the drawing discussed above, Aunt Mimi, settled in her chair and busy with her sewing, almost fades into the wallpaper. In another work, Ensor’s sleeping mother (1883 Tournai, Musée des Beaux Arts) morphs into a still life arrangement of middle-class accessories, including a fan, while another (Belgium, Private collection) juxtaposes Mitche’s head with a bottle of ink, and, just below, joins her hand with a book.10 Through these descriptive details, Ensor forges an intimate connection between the unguarded singular moments of women’s lives and material things, their production, and the bourgeois values they entail.

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Ensor’s numerous images of sleeping, reading, seemingly aloof women have led some authors to opine that, beyond posing, Aunt Mimi and Marie Catherine are dour petite bourgeois women who have little interest in or support for Ensor’s art practice. Ensor’s letters to his friend Mariette Rousseau offer however a more nuanced understanding of the Ensor household dynamic. Rather than the grumpy, sleepy, and lazy women, as the titles of some of these drawings might imply, Ensor’s mother and aunt are active, engaged women who traveled widely acquiring merchandise for the shop, regularly spent part of their winters in Brussels and were also involved with James’s artistic career. In addition to serving as models, his sister, mother, and aunt assisted Ensor with his art production. When he was making his large composite drawing, Temptation of Saint Anthony (Plate 20), for example, Ensor wrote to Mme. Rousseau that Aunt Mimi had helped assemble the separate sheets into a collage. At the same time, these drawings, along with the more formal portraits discussed earlier, record through these mundane everyday activities, the ways the work ethic interacted with the environment of the petite bourgeois home. While the summer is busy with the tourist trade, winter lethargy often overtook everyone in the Ensor household, providing a respite from the shop and, at the same time, models for his artwork. As Ensor wrote to the Rousseaus: “We have returned to our vegetative existence once more. Aunt Mimi sleeps, my mother is not in her usual after-dinner seat. Mitche practices her writing (not to you nor to mr. W). Me, I am doing nothing.”11 The Bourgeois Salon (Plate 7), contains many of the overlapping narratives circulating in the social space of the family household in Ostend. Set within the dining room, the painting invites its audience to examine and be captivated by the quiet pleasures of middle-class life. Two women, posed by Aunt Mimi and Mitche, seem unaware of the viewer as they attend to their sewing and reading. A rich palette of earth tones joins with the stream of warm sunlight streaming from windows on the right to so immerse the women seated at a cloth-covered table in the atmospheric ambiance of the setting that they seem almost incidental to the artist’s detailed appraisal of the interior and its possessions. Ensor’s representation here of the material spectacle of the bourgeois salon with all its modern amenities and signifiers of middle-class status such as gas lanterns and gilded mirrors, thick velvet curtains, plush furniture, and an elaborately patterned carpet both define this interior space and consign it value, enclosing the observer and these women in a world of bourgeois comfort. Ensor also replicates here the separate spheres of private and public life and the association of women with the domestic interior and an inactive lifestyle, a construction that, given the long hours that these women put in running the family store, seems contrary to their actual life circumstance. Immersed in the possessions and minutia of their middle-class aspiration, in this painting, Ensor’s sister and aunt settle into a staid, mundane domesticity, their non-working hours filled with the rituals of sewing, reading, and napping that defined the day–to-day experience of petite bourgeois women. Their labor hidden, their resting bodies conforming to the gendered confines of the home, and their identity defined by bourgeois domestic life, the women in Ensor’s salon join with the objects and artifacts around them to become part of what can be termed “the feminized interior,” a space filled with social narrative that he will explore extensively in his paintings between 1880 and

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1882. Ensor’s engagement with narratives on class and gender in these “bourgeois salons” and other social issues discussed in the next chapter will only increase as he encounters his contemporaries and the lively cultural and political world of the Belgian capital of Brussels.

Brussels: Metropolis of Modernity In 1877, Ensor moved to Brussels to begin his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Quite a contrast to small, provincial Ostend, the capital city with over 125,000 inhabitants and the location of the Belgian government and the royal court would soon expand Ensor’s social and artistic communities. While studying at the Academy, Ensor came to know a diverse group of intellectuals, many of them researchers and scholars, scientists, professors, and politicians associated with the Universitè Libre in Brussels (Free University or ULB). At the same time, he was also in contact with the then-emerging artistic and literary avant-garde, an interconnected network of artists, writers, lawyers, and critics centered in Brussels and engaged with modern art, literature, theater, and music as well as social theory and progressive politics. This network included writers that were part of the emerging Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium) movement and the modernist-oriented artist exhibition societies Société Libre des Beaux-Arts (The Free Society of Fine Arts) and La Chrysalide (The Chrysalis), These artistic and social circles introduce Ensor to a stimulating mix of radical politics, social activism, progressive science, and modernist aesthetics that would inspire his art practice. Ensor also begins his professional career in Brussels, cofounding there the artist group Les XX and exhibiting his work at the Triennial salon as well as alternative exhibition societies. The personal, artistic, and social contacts developed in Brussels provided then the sociability and supportive network so important to the formation of Ensor’s work and practice. As he had in his native Ostend, Ensor chronicled his response to this new social environment in numerous sketches and drawings that describe a lively urban space full of movement—figures passing in carriages, strolling women, day laborers, pushcarts, and horses. Along with the bustling street life, Ensor’s drawings and prints also record his interest in theater and mass entertainment. While these images capture part of Ensor’s experiences in Brussels, his interaction with his contemporaries and the social and creative relationships he developed in the capital city during this time would be instrumental to the development of his art career.

Ensor’s Second Family: The Rousseaus One of the first people Ensor met in Brussels was the already well-connected painterprintmaker Théo Hannon who was also a poet and art critic and a founding member in 1875 of the art group La Chrysalide. As editor of L’Artiste, Hannon became a leading proponent of realist theory and Belgian Naturalism with many contacts with both French and Belgian writers, including Joris Karl Huysmans with whom he carried on a long correspondence. The collection of poems for which he is most known,

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Rimes de Joie (Rhymes of Joy), with a preface by Huysmans and a frontispiece and three prints by Félicien Rops appeared in 1881, garnering Hannon much praise for his observant and fresh approach to naturalist poetry. Hannon would never surpass this prescient literary debut, however. Similarly, after exhibiting a few years with La Chrysalide, L’Essor, and the Society of Aquafortistes, Hannon let his artistic career languish, even though he continued to paint and kept a studio in Brussels until his death in 1916. By the mid-1880s Hannon began writing theatrical travesties, and in the 1880s and 1890s he achieved commercial success and popularity creating parodies, pantomines, and burlesque musical revues. Nine years older, Hannon played a significant role in Ensor’s early intellectual and artistic development, introducing him to realist theory and the work of Ėdouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, whose paintings and portraits Ensor copied in his sketchbook. Through Hannon as well, Ensor met other members of the La Chrysalide, including Félicien Rops and Constantin Meunier (1831–1905), and an invitation to exhibit at the group’s last salon in 1881. In these early years, Ensor and Hannon painted together and even shared studio space for a time. Ensor testified to that friendship and Hannon’s critical support in his large 1882 portrait of Hannon (Figure 2.6) where Hannon is seated at an easel, palette in hand in Ensor’s studio. The classic profile view and geometric compositional arrangement calls to mind Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (Figure 2.7) with the pose reversed with Hannon turned to the left rather than to the right. Like Manet, Ensor alludes to his art practice, placing his own paintings, including a still life and his portrait of his grandmother, Woman in Blue Shawl, in the background. In substituting Hannon for Zola, Ensor references the two artist’s shared aesthetic interests, his own admiration for Manet, Hannon’s enthusiasm for Zola, and perhaps, his hope for future collaborations. Like Manet, who sent his portrait of Zola to the Salon of 1868, Ensor included this portrait on his list for the 1888 Les XX salon, but it is unclear if the painting was on view. At some point, Ensor gave the painting to Hannon who kept it in his collection until his death. The mutual support implied by this portrait goes beyond a shared interest in Manet, Zola, and realist art theory. In addition to providing contacts and introductions to contemporary artists and invitations to show his work, Hannon also introduced Ensor to his family: brother Édouard, sister, Mariette (1850–1926), and her husband Ernest Rousseau Sr. (1835–1905) and their son Ernest Jr. The Rousseau—Hannon family soon became Ensor’s second family, leading to a long, sustaining friendship. Ernest Rousseau Sr. was from a well-connected family that included his older brother Jean-Baptiste (1829–1891) an arts writer and critic who later became an arts administrator for the Belgian government, younger brother Omer (1836–1892), a colonel in the army corps of engineers, and another brother Edouard who was a lawyer to the Belgian court. As a professor at both the Military Academy and ULB, Ernest specialized in physics and geometry with a focus on the practical applications of science. He designed several apparatus and instruments for measuring photometric and electrodynamic energy and was particularly interested in electricity and the development of the incandescent light, publishing the results of his research in 1887 and exhibiting some of his experiments at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889.

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Figure 2.6  James Ensor, Portrait of Théo Hannon, 1882, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 50.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders. be, photo Hugo Maertens)

Figure 2.7  Édouard Manet, Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868, oil on canvas, 146 × 114 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Hervé Lewandowski)

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Dr. Rousseau’s life-long study and experimental research in modern science reflected his belief in the useful role of science based on rationalism, in free, nonreligious education, and social liberty, perspectives that allied him with Belgium’s progressive Liberals and Freemasons. With his knowledge of science and mathematics, dedication to teaching, belief in humanist rationalism, and brilliant, inquiring mind focused on the practical applications of modern experience, Dr. Rousseau had all the characteristics Ensor later attributed to his own father. He was, to paraphrase Ensor’s description of his father, a “superior man” and the artist, when he reminisced about his father in later life, possibly conflated the two men, ascribing to his father the same intellectual success that he found in the person of Ernest Rousseau. Interestingly, like his own father, Ensor made only a few images of Dr. Rousseau including a drawing (1887, Ostend, Mu.ZEE) that in turn was used to create a drypoint etching that same year (T.11) (Figure 2.8). Both the drawing and drypoint depict Rousseau, dressed in a suit standing in profile, his bulky body in an informal but characteristic pose with one hand on his hip, that offers little insight into his personality. The simple outline and broad pencil stroke Ensor uses to fill in Rousseau’s form indicates that he was copying from a photograph rather than working from direct observation while focusing on carefully observed details of Rousseau’s face including his large nose, rounded jowls, and ruddy, perhaps unshaven face and mustache. The similarity to a portrait bust by Jef Lambeaux (1887, Brussels, Free University) suggests both used the same photographic source to convey Rousseau’s presence and prestige. Mariette Hannon-Rousseau, Ernest’s wife and Théo’s sister was also a scientist, a botanist specializing in the study of mushrooms. Like other women of her class, Mariette, who had been interested in science from childhood, had little access to education beyond Figure 2.8  James Ensor, Ernest Rousseau, 1887, 3/4, drypoint etching on paper, 22.8 × 16.8 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus PK.MP.09489 (photo: https:// dams.antwerpen.be, Museum PlantinMoretus)

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primary school and was not allowed to attend the Free University despite her father Joseph-Désiré Hannon (1822–1870) teaching zoology and comparative anatomy there. Professor Hannon, however, encouraged his daughter’s interest in botany, giving her private instruction at home and inviting other faculty to prepare lessons for Mariette. When Professor Hannon died in 1870, his colleague Ernest Rousseau assumed the responsibility for teaching Mariette and her brothers. Mariette continued her education in Germany where she refined her French and learned German and English (later she would also study Italian and Latin). Returning to Belgium and despite an age difference of fifteen years, she married her tutor, Professor Rousseau, in 1871. Mariette’s interest in botany was further stimulated through her friendship with another ULB professor, Jean-Édouard Bommer (1829–1895), and his wife Elisa Caroline Destrée-Bommer (1832–1910). Professor Bommer, also a conservator at the Royal Botanical Garden, taught Elisa how to identify and classify botanical specimens and granted both Elisa and Mariette access to the Botanical Garden’s library and collections. He also encouraged his wife and Mme. Rousseau to pursue the then-new and little know field of mycology and eventually, the two women published the first studies of mushrooms in Belgium.12 As a middle class woman in late nineteenth-century Belgium, Mariette HannonRousseau had few political rights and could not, like her husband, teach at the university or hold a position at a research lab (she only gained affiliation with the Botanical Garden in 1908). Nevertheless, she maintained an active publishing career as a botanist and documented her research with frequent field trips gathering mushroom specimens around Brussels. Through their fathers and husbands, Mmes. Rousseau and Bommer had access to libraries (Mariette’s father had a large library, as did Ernest Rousseau) and also met and worked with many scientists associated with the Royal Botanical Society including the noted botanist Ėlie Marchal (1839–1923), who named the fungal species “Bommerella marchal” in Elisa Bommer’s honor, and François Crépin (1830–1903) who served as the director both there and at the Museum of Natural Sciences, near one of the Rousseau’s homes. Although they had access and support from their peers, Rousseau and Bommer worked hard and spent many hours self-training to develop the methodology for their mycology research. In addition to her research collaborations with Mme. Bommer, Mme. HannonRousseau kept up an active correspondence with contemporary botanists and researchers, transcribed her husband’s lecture notes, and regularly hosted the salons at the Rousseau home attended by scientists, artists, writers, and many of Ernest Rousseau’s colleagues from the Free University and Military Academy. As a proper bourgeois woman, Mariette also maintained the Rousseau household (with the assistance no doubt of servants) and took on the role of mother after the birth of her only son Ernest Rousseau Junior in 1872. Later, when Ernest Jr.’s wife Emilie Nahrath died in 1901, Mariette Rousseau helped raise her two grandchildren. In Ensor’s drawings, Mariette is often portrayed as an educated woman—in an 1885 drawing, she is seen in profile looking down as if reading or cataloging specimens (Ostende, Mu.ZEE); a larger 1889 drawing (Ghent, private collection) depicts her at home or possibly at the Botanical Gardens, the nearby microscope, an instrument only then being introduced for scientific research, attesting to the scholarly nature of her study. The image of Madonna and Child included in the scene above alludes

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to her dual role as a scientist and mother. As his portrait of Ernest Rousseau, Ensor presents the sitter in Renaissance profile. But unlike Ernest Rousseau who is seen from below and against a plain backdrop in a pose that lends him paternalistic distance, Ensor’s depiction of Mariette remains close and intimate, the collaborative and personal nature of their friendship reinforced by his signing the drawing as if a signature in her book. Indeed, Ensor’s friendship with Mariette appears to have been close, admiring, and platonic. Ten years older than James, Mariette was married to a man Ensor greatly admired and, as a principal in the literate and urbane Hannon-Rousseau family, Madame Rousseau put forward to Ensor and his sister a model of bourgeois womanhood that was both modern and independent. The relationship between Mariette and Ensor is well documented in letters and the drawings collected in the Carnet Rousseau that included images of the artist (such as the one discussed in the last chapter) letters, drawings, calling cards from both James and Mitche as well as other sketches and even a coat of arms with mushrooms that Ensor designed for Mariette, a humorous yet apt representation of Mariette’s profession. Unlike the sleepy atmosphere of the family home portrayed in Ensor’s drawings of his aunt and mother, these drawings are lively and often humorous descriptions of everyday activities and events at the Rousseau home (Figure 2.9), the numerous excursions and adventures of Mariette, James, and Mitche, along with circus and vaudeville scenes (some of these dedicated to Mariette’s son, Ernest Jr., called “Nene”) that convey the closeness of the friendship between Ensor, his sister, and the Rousseaus. Ernest Rousseau Jr., only seven when Ensor met his parents and twelve years younger than the artist, became by the early 1890s an accomplished scientist who had published his first scientific essay, The Malacoderms of Belgium, at the age of eighteen. Ernest Jr. completed his studies in medicine at ULB in 1896 (after finishing two candidacies in science (1889–1890 and 1890–1891), two candidacies in medicine (1891–1892 and 1892–1893), and doctoral degrees in medicine (1893–1894), external medicine (1894–1895), and internal medicine (1895–1896) and soon began his laboratory and medical practice. In addition to seeing patients and teaching, beginning Figure 2.9  James Ensor, Sketchbook page (Carnet Rousseau), pencil, conté crayon on paper, 28.7 × 41.1 cm, c.1883, Brussels, RMFAB (© KIK-IRPA, photo: Jacques Declercq)

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in 1898 Ernest Jr. was a researcher at the Museum of Natural Sciences where he developed new experimental methods utilizing the microscope. Ernest Jr.’s research in zoology focused on the study of primitive skeletal organisms, especially those of mollusks and sponges, and calcification. While it seems unlikely that Ensor, who first began including skeletons and skulls in his work in the mid-1880s, was influenced by the younger Rousseau’s later research specialization, they both shared a fascination with bones. Ernest Jr.’s collection of bones and skeletons would be readily available to the artist and some of the skulls included in Ensor’s works could have been gifts from Ernest. A photograph dating from 1892 reflects their personal dynamic as the two men posed humorously in the dunes near Ostend where skeletal remains from the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Belgium could still be found (Figure 2.10). Ensor’s artworks allude at times to the family’s involvement with the natural sciences and Darwinian theory. His 1888 etching Small Bizarre Figures (Figure 2.11) Figure 2.10 Anonymous, Ernest Rousseau Jr and Ensor in the Dunes near Ostend, c.1892, photograph, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© Mu.ZEE, photo: courtesy, Ostend, Mu.ZEE)

Figure 2.11  James Ensor, Small Bizarre Figures, 1888, 2/2, etching on paper, 13.3 × 9.2 cm, Ghent, MSK (© MSK, photo: Ghent, MSK)

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(T. 53) depicts Mme. Rousseau as a dragonfly, Ernest Rousseau as a beetle, and their son Ernest Jr. as a moth larva. Ensor wearing a bowler hat and holding a palette, his body constructed from skeletal vertebrae bones, stands next to a horned creature with a man’s body and wings. At the center is an unidentified woman with a moth and skull’s head suspended above her. The kind of transformation and juxtaposition that Ensor had discovered in his exploration of drawing and printmaking processes is joined in this print and others with a personal and a rather unscientific representation of evolution and biology. Metamorphosis and the fanciful joining of human and insect species tacked up like specimens on display in Small Bizarre Figures present the Rousseaus as a family of scientists and engineers dedicated to the study of natural and physical sciences. In this era of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Ensor’s droll inclusion of himself in this biological world and decision to portray both himself and the Rousseaus as bugs can be understood then as an ironic spoof on the rational, social views of the Rousseau’s radical household as well as his own rather subjective interpretation of modern scientific theory. As a frequent visitor at the Hannon-Rousseau home in the 1880s, Ensor came in contact with an enlightened and radical milieu of scientists and free thinkers centered around the Free University in Brussels, then a hotbed of scientific positivism, progressive Liberal politics, and Freemasonry, and at the recently established Botanical Garden and Museum of Natural Sciences. Through Mariette and her colleague Elisa Bommer’s connection to the Botanical Garden, Ensor probably met, in addition to Crépin and Marchal, Bommer’s husband Jean-Édouard who was a conservator there as well as a professor of botany at the Free University and quite possibly Leo Errera (1858–1905) who was one of the earliest defenders in Belgium of Darwin’s theories. Ensor’s 1886 print portrait of the Swedish Botanist Elias Magnus Fries (1794–1878) (T.3), considered the founding father of mushroom taxonomy, testifies to the lively scientific community around the Rousseaus and, in particular, to Mariette Rousseau professionalism as a botanist, as it was Fries system that she and Bommer adopted for their inventory of Belgian fungi. While Mariette and her colleagues kept Ensor informed on current debates over evolutionary theory, Ernest Rousseau, known for his lively lectures and demonstrations of his research on electricity at numerous conferences and Universal Exhibitions, shared recent scientific discoveries regarding electricity. Rousseau also introduced Ensor to his colleagues at ULB, many of whom, like the sociologist Hector Denis (1842–1913), were professors and researchers in the emerging fields of natural and social sciences and to his colleague, Gérard Matthieu Leman (1851–1920) a fellow teacher at the Military Academy. Other attendees Ensor met at the Rousseau salons included the lawyer, cultural critic, and socialist Jules Destrée (1863–1941) and the writers Camille Lemonnier (1844–1913) and Eugène Demolder (1862–1919). The anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) and his brother Élie (1827–1904) were also regular visitors, as their sister Louise Reclus-Dumesnil (1839–1917) was Mariette Rousseau’s best friend. Other scientists Ensor possibly met at the Rousseau salons included the sociologist Guillaume de Greef (1842–1924), Jean Massart (1865–1925), and Emile VanderVelde (1866–1925) as well as the chemist, industrialist, and philanthropist Ernest Solvay (1838–1922).

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Figure 2.12  James Ensor, Hector Denis, 1890, 2/2, etching on paper, 11.7 × 7.1 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus PK.MP.01218 (photo: https://dams. antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

Like his portrait of Fries and Small Bizarre Figures, Ensor’s 1890 etching of Denis (Figure 2.12) alludes to this heady intellectual environment as well as to the challenges and tension in these circles between developing new methodologies in science (in Denis’s case, the new social science of sociology) and sustaining an involvement with radical politics. A Comptian positivist and follower of Proudhon, Denis taught at the Free University (beginning in 1878) as well as courses in philosophy, law, political economy, economic geography, and sociology for the city of Brussels throughout the 1880s. Denis also cofounded the journals La Liberté and La Société Nouvelle, publishing research that explored the social mission of positivist philosophy, and served as director (along with de Greef and Vandervelde) of the Institute of Sociology (founded by Solvay in 1894) from 1897 to 1902. Based on a photograph, Ensor’s etching focuses on Denis’s pose and contemplative outward-looking gaze, emphasizing the sociologist’s role as an engaged thinker, collaborator, and activist. The ties between science and politics so prevalent at the Rousseau home came to the forefront in 1893 when their friend, the geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, was invited to present a course on comparative geography at the ULB. Fearing repercussions, the University’s administration canceled the class. This decision met with a large public protest and resignations from several faculty members, and Denis stepped down as rector but maintained his ties with the Free University. The following year, the alternative New University was established, and Reclus was able to present his course. Eighteen students, including Ernest Rousseau Jr., who was then finishing his first doctorate in medicine, also joined the public protest and were excluded from the Free University. Although eventually he finished his studies, Ernest Jr.’s participation in this incident underscores once again the radical nature of the Rousseau household.13

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The Rousseaus welcomed Ensor into their homes in Brussels, particularly the one on the rue Vautier near the Museum of Natural Sciences where they set aside a room for his frequent visits.14 Ensor’s mother, aunt, and especially his sister were also friends, visiting the Rousseaus when they stayed in Brussels during the winter months. In turn, Mariette and Ernest travelled to Ostend during the summer, where they exchanged gifts, and sometimes stayed with the Ensor’s at the family home. The Rousseau family also supported James Ensor’s art practice: paying him a stipend in exchange for paintings as well as buying paintings at the Les XX salons or directly from the artist. Ensor in return, sent them illustrated letters and drawings, some of which Mariette saved in her scrapbook. When Ensor began making prints, he asked Mariette to assist him by bringing plates, which he stored at one of the Rousseau homes, to the printer in exchange for a proof. In addition to providing patronage and a supportive milieu for Ensor’s intellectual and political engagement, the Rousseaus also appear in his work, often in humorous satires. In Ensor and Leman Discuss Painting (Plate 8), Mariette becomes the bemused mediator in a farcical debate. As his uniform makes clear, Gérard Leman, was a member of the Belgian military and later was the defender of Liège in the First World War. The painting, filled with humor and bawdry sexual innuendo, portrays Ensor as an artist-provocateur willing to counter any argument with a mighty thrust of his brush. Leman, his head crowned by a rather paltry laurel wreath, and the compass and square—the Freemason symbol for the Great Architect of the Universe—faces off and fires a toy cannon against Ensor. Ensor, on the right, deflects Leman’s charge with a cheeky counter-attack. Head and neck thrust aggressively forward he stares down his mock opponent as he pokes a rather large brush at Leman’s nose. Four feathers rise from the top of Ensor’s head as if adorning a military shako even as they also evoke the posturing of an aroused and aggressive cock. As he blocks the discharge of the general’s phallic cannon with his finger, Ensor performs his own act of sabotage, countering this misfire with his own artistic virility and social radicalism signaled by the rooster’s headdress, thrusting brush and bulging red phallus-like palette. As he challenges Leman with the potent and transgressive performance of his own body, palette, and especially his provocative tickling brush, Ensor renders this military man’s authority impotent. Placed between these two dueling men, Mariette Rousseau leans her head toward the Leman while rolling her eyes in amusement, perhaps at the absurdity of this mock battle. The artist’s exaggerated posturing and the image’s ribald and thinly disguised sexual metaphor link this image directly to contemporary caricature, especially the absurdist zwanze humor popular in the Rousseau household. Similarly, the exaggerated cartoonish style of Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Speak with Sophie Yoteko (Plate 9) suggests that the scene in this small painting on wood represents a burlesque travesty in which once again inversion and humor reign. Sporting a scruffy beard and wearing a woman’s dress and hat, Ensor makes an appearance as “Sophie Yoteko” as he faces Mariette Rousseau, who also wears a hat as Ernest Rousseau stands between them. But instead of Ensor doing mock battle with Leman, now he and Mariette offer Ernest flowers as Mr. Rousseau’s eyes look back and forth between the two.

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Whatever private associations among these friends, Ensor’s flat style and crossdressing appearance signal his parodic intent. Indeed, Monsieur and Madame Rousseau speak with Sophie Yoteko appears to be a rather theatrical joke shared among all parties. Cross-dressing was common not only at carnival time but also could be seen regularly in burlesque reviews like Théo Hannon’s Bruxelles Sans Gêne or Bruxelles au Vol where male comedians performed skits dressed as women. In this painting, perhaps an allusion to Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular three act comic light opera The Mikado that premiered (in French) at the Alhambra Theater in Brussels on December 23, 1889, Ensor assumes the role of the slightly Japanese-sounding Sophie Yoteko, a name he might have borrowed from Sofia Ioteiko (1866–1928), a friend of the Rousseaus studying psychology at ULB.15 This word play, the artist’s female attire, and the flowers all mock courtship, presenting a coded yet playful jest that also spoofs Rousseau’s conventional marriage with the kind of farce, double entendre, and topicality found in contemporary theater parodies.

The Making of an Avant-Garde Artist: The Brussels Art World While the hospitality, friendship and patronage of the Hannon-Rousseau family nurtured and supported Ensor, it would be the alliance of science, socialism, and politics he encountered at the Rousseau salons that would inspire and radicalize his art practice throughout the 1880s. The stimulating intellectual milieu at the Rousseaus expanded further as Ensor interacted with the emerging literary and artistic avant-garde in Brussels. The friendship, collective camaraderie, professional contacts, exhibition possibilities, critical recognition, and patronage of these contacts encouraged and sustained Ensor while the comingling of new art, theory, and politics invigorated his artistic vision and the social orientation of his art practice. Even if a growing sense of entitlement would later lead Ensor to follow his own independent path, it would be in this productive exchange with the Belgian artistic avant-garde, and, in particular Les XX, that he discovered new strategies and ways of working and produced his most important, innovative, and socially engaged work. Ensor’s initial exchanges with his art world contemporaries began in 1877 when, hoping for an artistic career, at the age of seventeen he came to study at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. Yet, as his satirical essay “Three Weeks at the Academy” written after he left the Academy in 1880 makes clear, during his three years of study, Ensor learned all too well the real purpose of such training was as much about connections and politics as the study of technique. Ensor would later dismiss the academy as a “box of myopics” filled with teachers who did not understand his work. Many years later, Ensor recalled the drudgery—boring academic exercises and drawing from plaster casts—as well as the excitement of exploring the modern city with his sketchbook always available for recording observations. Ensor also remembered his interest in a broad range of materials and approaches, and his willingness to confront the outmoded instruction of traditional art training through rude disruption (painting, for example. a plaster cast with bright, bold flesh colors), and satire.16 Ensor’s reminiscences are also

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selective and disingenuous, cultivating, as had his self-portraits discussed in Chapter 1, his precocious abilities and discordant point of view. In an 1899 letter to Jules du Jardin, for example, he claimed he received a second prize for drawing of an antique head, but noted that his modernist explorations were less appreciated: “My sincere landscape studies had sent me out into the open air and already I sensed the importance of light. The new experiments displeased the teachers and soon (I never really found out why) I began to be regarded as an incorrigible revolutionary.”17 Ensor, did not, however, receive second prize for his drawing from the antique but rather third in his second year of study and thirteenth out of sixteen in life painting. The other two years he was regularly classified at the bottom of the class. Yet even if his performance at the Academy at least in terms of juries and prizes was less than noteworthy, these three years were valuable to Ensor both artistically and socially. At the Academy, Ensor learned the principles of history painting, especially how to make large complex compositions, lessons that he would soon apply to his drawings, particularly the Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light series begun in 1885. He would continue throughout the 1880s to emulate the format and scope of history painting making over-sized drawings like Temptation of St. Anthony (Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago) and the monumental Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 that, as will be discussed in the next chapter, make reference to Belgian history painting. Through his studies, Ensor learned how to draw and paint directly from the model and from life, assimilating realist theory, albeit in a conservative academic manner. Indeed, even though Ensor called the Academy’s Director, JeanFrancois Portaels, a “bully,” Portaels had initiated reforms that led to the inclusion of realist practices into the curriculum. As well, as Ensor never failed to mention, Portaels kept The Mystical Death of the Theologian, a large-scale historical composition that demonstrates Ensor’s abilities at allegory and interest in religion and historical themes, in his private collection for many years. Even though Ensor failed to finish his studies and left the Academy in 1880, he was nevertheless invited to exhibit with the academic L’Essor exhibition society in 1882 and 1883 and sent work to the official salons in Brussels (1881), Paris (1882), Antwerp (1882), and Ghent (1883). The Academy also brought Ensor to Brussels where he experienced urban culture for the first time. In this capital city, Ensor met fellow artists Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), Paul Dubois (1829–1905), Alfred William “Willy” Finch (1854–1930), Guillaume van Strydonck (1861–1937), Dario de Regoyos (1857–1913), Willy Schlobach (1864–1951), and Rudolph Wystman (1860–1927), all who attended the Brussels Academy at the same time. Khnopff and Finch were in several of his classes and Willy Finch soon became a close friend and a model for several of Ensor’s early paintings. Despite an age difference of six years, Ensor and Finch had much in common. Like James, Willy spent his childhood in Ostend where his family had moved in 1857 and his father Joseph James Lindsey Finch was a shopkeeper, seeking like Ensor’s family, to profit from Ostend’s transformation into a resort town. Joseph Finch was successful enough at his shop to acquire the Cercle du Phare in 1865 and transform it into a popular hotel. As the eldest of a large family of five children, Willy helped his father run the business which brought him into contact with the hotel’s guests including artists

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Félicien Rops and Louis Artan de Saint-Martin (1837–1890) who encouraged him to pursue an artistic career. In addition to their common petit-bourgeois background and Ostend childhoods, Ensor and Finch also shared personal and economic hardship. Unable to compete with new hotels being built and the relocation of the casino and boardwalk further west, Finch’s father (like Ensor’s father six years previously) declared bankruptcy in 1881. Two years later, in 1883, shortly before the meeting to constitute Les XX, Finch’s mother died, obligating Willy to help support the remaining siblings while continuing his art career. As noted earlier, Ensor’s father would die four years later in 1887. Finch enrolled at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts for only one year in 1878 but during that time he met the younger James Ensor. For seven years, Ensor and Finch remained close, posing for each other, sharing the same motifs, and even developing similar approaches and reputations that, as Georges Lemmen (1865–1916) recalled, “thought to find in nature, and especially in the study of luminous phenomena, eternal elements of beauty. This claim, coupled with the respect they professed for the true masters, contributed not a little to affirming their dangerous reputation as revolutionaries.”18 Most likely, the radicalism Lemmen describes was influenced by both artist’s association with the Rousseaus as well as the realist-oriented work they both showed at L’Essor and the more progressive La Chrysalide exhibition societies in the early 1880s. Early on, Finch and Ensor often painted side by side, sharing models, still life arrangements, and landscape views. The young boy who posed for Ensor 1880 painting The Lamplighter (Figure 3.4) is also seen in several of Finch’s drawings dating from the same year now in the collection of the Tournai Museum of Fine Arts. Both artists made paintings of the same stingray, with Finch positioning the viewer closer while Ensor steps back to present a broader view.19 More so than Finch, Ensor focused on the figure and portraiture with his friend serving as a model for his large 1881 interior with multiple figures Chez Miss (later renamed Russian Music) (Plate 12) that will be discussed in Chapter 3. Between 1880 and 1882 Ensor painted numerous images of Finch in the studio, testifying to their affinity and mutual support. Ensor’s 1880 portrait of Willy Finch standing at an easel (Figure  2.13) is similar to his own 1879 self-portrait (Figure  1.3), suggesting both the remarkable exchange that took place between these two artists at the beginning of their careers and Ensor’s self-identification with his older colleague. In his self-portrait, Ensor stands next to an easel in a darkened studio interior, holding a large palette as he gazes out at the viewer. Likewise, Ensor’s portrait of Finch also shows him standing at an easel, but rather than the self-portrait’s torso view, Finch’s whole body is seen in profile. Repeating a composition Ensor would use in his other portraits of Finch at his easel, Finch, wearing a dark suit and holding a large palette, props his foot on the easel stand and regards his painting. Ensor shifts from heavy impasto to a more fluid brushstroke, but in tonality, color range, placement, and pose, the two paintings could be mirror images. In an 1882 portrait (Figure 2.14) Finch is seated next to a table with an open sketchbook, his head and hands modeled in strong chiaroscuro. Turning to face the viewer, Finch points his finger in a rather informal act that appears to acknowledge and imply, as does the expression, that the returned gaze is that of his friend James.

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 2.13  James Ensor, The Artist Willy Finch Standing at His Easel, 1882, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 29.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Rik Klein Gotink)

Figure 2.14 James Ensor, Portrait of Willy Finch, 1882, oil on canvas, 110 × 95 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Cedric Verhelst)

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Unlike Ensor’s smaller painting of Théo Hannon, also painted in 1882, Finch’s portrait, although in a similar pose, is familiar and relaxed, suggesting the personal give-andtake between two artists. Despite his proximity to the foreground, Hannon’s portrait appears more distanced, with the arrangement and references highlighting his role as an artist, critic, and Ensor’s mentor. The casual interaction between the artist and Finch in his portrait implies a symbiotic, equal, and exchangeable relationship—both serve as the artist and the model. In these early years of their friendship, the two artists had remarkably similar techniques, building form in their drawings and paintings with angular structural strokes that pointed to a shared appreciation for Manet and Courbet. Ensor’s loose, painterly technique is indebted as well to Belgian realist painters associated with the Société Libre, especially those who focused on light and atmospheric effects like the marine painter Louis Artan de Saint-Martin, the landscapist Hippolyte Boulenger (1837–1874) and especially Guillaume Vogels (1836–1896). Although twenty-four years older, Vogels was also a close friend of Ensor during these years. They probably met at La Chrysalide in 1878 when Vogels exhibited there or they may have been introduced to each other by Rops. After many years as a decorative painter, Vogels had only been painting on canvas for a short time but was already widely appreciated by his peers for his synthesis of a Courbet-inspired palette knife technique and a Northern Impressionist focus on tonality and atmosphere. Joined at times by Finch, Ensor and Vogels often painted together with Ensor quickly assimilating Vogels’s technique. With their accent on subtle notations of atmospheric conditions and light, the landscapes Ensor made between 1879 and 1881 are remarkably similar to those painted by Vogels during these same years. Ensor and Vogels exhibited together (with the Dutch artist Carel Nicolaas Storm van’s-Gravesande [1841–1924]) at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in 1884 in Brussels, and then as fellow artist-members at Les XX. They also made several trips together, traveling to Amsterdam and the Netherlands in October 1883, and possibly to England in 1886 or 1887. Vogels who rarely sold his own work, also bought two of Ensor’s paintings, testifying to his high regard for his younger colleague. With the support of the close and collaborative friendships he formed with Hannon, Finch, and Vogels, Ensor began to establish himself in the Brussels art world, receiving invitations to the progressive La Chrysalide salon in 1881, the more academic L’Essor, a three-person show with Hannon and Jan van Beers at the Ostend Casino in August 1882 and a solo show at this same venue in August 1883, and with the Royal Society of Watercolorists. His relationship with the conservative Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels was more difficult. He exhibited with them in 1882 and again in March, of 1884 in a three-person show with Vogels. Yet after their initial invitation in 1882, this same group rejected two of his submitted paintings in 1883 and 1884. These rejections along with In the Land of Colors (subsequently renamed The Oyster Eater) by1882 Antwerp Salon as well as two more paintings excluded from the 1884 Brussels Salon only affirmed Ensor’s growing reputation as an anti-academic artist, an identification he did not attempt to conceal.

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The time spent with his friends in Brussels was quite different from the more isolated, mercantile life at home in Ostend. In Brussels, there was a community of artists who, like him, were mostly young men with similar middle-class backgrounds. Painting and drawing each other, working together in the studio from the same model or still-life motif, going on excursions to paint landscapes or visiting exhibitions, the collaborative context of these early artistic exchanges fostered in Ensor a sense of bohemian camaraderie and friendship that would lead critics only a few years later to accuse Ensor of starting his own “school.” He may have been bored in his classes at the Academy but encouragement by colleagues in and outside of classes bolstered Ensor’s growing commitment to his own vision.

An Artist’s Bohemia: Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde Even if he had benefited from his academic training, Ensor’s provocative essay “Three Weeks at the Academy,” portrayed the Academy as so outmoded, contradictory, and petty that, as the essay ends, the young artist leaves the Academy, and, rejected by the Salon, joins Les XX. Youth and modernity, this essay makes clear, are not to be found at official art venues but rather at a new, truly radical, exhibition society—that is, at Les XX. Established late in 1883 with Ensor as a founding member, Les XX organized their annual group exhibitions around a collective model. The artist-members would show their work and invite other like-minded artists from both Belgium and elsewhere to show with them, advancing in this manner the notion of an international coterie of progressive artists dedicated to bringing modern art to the Belgian public. Reflecting their leftist, democratic orientation and hoping to keep internal power struggles and theoretical arguments to a minimum, the group eliminated membership requirements and any jury, instead nominating and electing new members through group vote. Placements were determined by lot and each artist installed their own work. Rather than scattered throughout the salon or hung in the floor-to-ceiling presentation of the official Salon, each artist’s work was grouped together in a row and hung at eye-level from the railing. The group’s logo designed by Fernand Khnopff—two overlapping X’s-—symbolized Les XX’s accent on both individualism and group solidarity. Les XX quickly gained a reputation in Belgium as a radical artist’s society that joined social activism with a modernist practice. The group’s avant-garde stance was due in no small part to the promotional efforts of L’Art moderne and its editors, Edmond Picard, Octave Maus (1856–1919), who was also Les XX’s secretary, and Emile Verhaeren who joined the staff in 1885. With L’Art moderne as their platform, Maus, Picard, and Verhaeren along with invited writers (including Ensor), wrote essays and reviews on contemporary culture—primarily the fine arts, literature, theater, and music that advanced modernist aesthetics, progressive politics, anarcho-socialism, and Belgian nationalism. L’Art moderne’s combative and polemical rhetoric promoted Les XX’s aesthetic program, even if the essays reflected more the concerns and beliefs of the journal’s editors than those of the diverse group of artists who had initially declared their allegiance to freedom of individual expression over any particular art movement.

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But the arrangement proved to be mutually beneficial. L’Art moderne provided Les XX a platform for publicizing their artists and activities while the group’s salons demonstrated the validity of L’Art moderne’s mission, political perspective, and aesthetic concerns that, in turn, lent the journal and its editors’ prestige and eventually international recognition. Les XX’s salons soon became important artistic and social events, attended by a broad segment of the Belgian cultural elite including, in addition to the invited artists, aristocrats and the haute-bourgeois, and even state ministers, leading one critic to comment upon the group’s mastery of the art of public spectacle: “Oh! Les XX, what skill they show, as they know how to whip up their annual exhibitions with savvy announcements, as they make art to excite curiosity, to incite artistic quarrels, and to intrigue the indifferent.”20 The Belgian public, their interest whetted by Les XX’s shrewd use of publicity, was eager to pay for the privilege of discovering the latest art and despite their anarcho-socialist leanings, Les XX was not above charging for entry to their salons. Every year attendance rose, making Les XX highly profitable for both the group as a whole and for its artist-members, including Ensor who sold work there. Ensor’s financial fortunes and artistic status were inexorably linked with Les XX and thus, even after his relations with the group and especially with Octave Maus became strained in the mid-1880s, Ensor continued sending large numbers of works to Les XX’s annual salons. In its articles and reviews (written anonymously, but most likely penned by Maus, Picard, and Verhaeren) L’Art moderne understated any connection to the official Belgian art world, and instead promoted Les XX’s anti-academic, anti-establishment stance as radical “carriers of the new.” More savvy publicity and a well-cultivated public posture than reality, the group’s radical polemic, as Michel Draguet has shown, obscured conservative membership in the group and the many members who also exhibited at official Salons and continued to develop their careers through government support and the patronage of upper-class clients even as they exhibited their work at Les XX.21 While Ensor and other more progressive artists in Les XX benefited from their public representation as rebellious revolutionaries bringing new art to Brussels, this obfuscation of the group’s regional differences and diverse artistic approaches under the umbrella of a unified and radical Belgian avant-garde also created conflict and internal tensions as well as struggles for position and power, especially for Ensor, who from the very beginning was already considered a leading member of the group.

Ensor at Les XX: The Early Salons Ensor felt right at home among the progressive artists who formed the core of Les XX. In addition to Finch and Vogels, Ensor knew Khnopff, van Strydonck, Dario de Regoyos, Théo van Rysselberghe (1862–1926), Frantz Charlet, and the Dutch/Javanese artist Jan Toorop (1858–1928) from the Academy and Félicien Rops, who showed with Les XX in 1884 and became a member in1886, through Hannon and as a fellow exhibitor at La Chrysalide, Ensor soon emerged as a leader, his enthusiasm for Les XX’s radical polemic evident in a letter to de Regoyos from December 1884. Discussing the latest artist to resign

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from the group, and the proposal, circulated by some of the group’s more conservative members, to discontinue the lecture program, Ensor makes clear his views and his active involvement in the group’s collective aesthetic: Did you know that Piet Verhaert has given his resignation from Les XX and that they want to stop the lecture series? That’s a shame as the lectures seriously annoy the bourgeoisie. I regret that very much. When you return we shall endeavor to boot out: Delvin, Simonis, Verstraete and Vanaise. As long as those ill-bred pedants are there the circle will always have the atmosphere of the backside. Then we can re-establish the lectures and form a truly artistic circle.22

Even if the artists mentioned represented the group’s more traditional members, from Ensor’s perspective, they conveyed the wrong “aroma” for Les XX, their work an unpleasant distraction from the progressive agenda advocated by the artist and his colleagues. For many reviewers, whatever their critical position, Ensor epitomized Les XX’s radical anarchist orientation. In his review of the 1885 Les XX salon, Victor Redding called Ensor, Finch, Toorop, and Vogels as the only “true openly anarchistic Vingtistes, for whom painting furnishes the material for their battles on land and on sea”.23 Redding’s perspective was shared that year by other critics who separated Les XX into progressive and conservative wings, with Ensor always associated with the most radical leftist elements. Even worse, the critics believed Ensor’s subversive art was leading other artists in the group astray, influencing them as members of his “school” to follow a similar extremist path. Ensor heartily embraced this public perception of him as a leader of the radical Belgian avant-garde, even including the statement “refused by the Brussels salon” to works shown at Les XX’s second salon in 1885. By 1886 most reviewers regarded Ensor as the leading practitioner of Belgian Impressionism only adding to the negative critical reaction and dismissal: Calling Ensor the “new prophet of light” Georges Verdavainne accused his “disciples” Finch, Vogels, Troorop, de Regoyos, Schlobach, Charlet, Verheyden, Van Strydonck, and even Van Rysselberghe of blindly copying “his method, his violent colorations, his scorn for form and details. There are paintings by Messieurs Finch, Schlobach, and Toorop that Ensor would happily sign.”24 L’Impartial de Gand’s critic was even more dismissive: “At Les XX there is a god—Ensor—and upon this god, a mold has been made, and in this mold, all the artists gladly will be cast.”25 Reviewers continued to criticize what they saw as Ensor’s lack of composition and drawing skills, especially in the brightest and most colorful painting on display, The Oyster Eater (Plate 13). L. Hemma (Albert Mockel) summarized the critical reaction calling Ensor’s direct application and loose gestural brushwork objectionable: “. . . frankly horrible: the scale, the gaudy colors, without perspective or if you like reliefs of material things reproduced in the planisphere according to the Mercator process.”26 The conservative press’s tendency to portray Ensor as a radical subversive with undue influence at Les XX might have tempered the public’s reception of his art and ideas, but these negative reviews only clarified and bolstered Ensor’s avant-garde selfidentification highlighted in works like Self-Portrait in Flowered Hat. However, as the

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interests of Les XX’s artist-members shifted to new artists and concerns, the group dynamic changed and Ensor’s early prominence waned, leading to a power struggle with group members and especially with Octave Maus. For two years, Ensor’s relationship with his fellow Vingtists was cordial and constructive. Even though he had returned to live with his family in Ostend, Ensor visited Brussels often and even lived there for short periods in 1885–1886 and again in 1887–1888. He remained active in the affairs of the group, voting by letter on such matters as membership, invitations, and maintenance of the group’s annual lecture series. His friendly and positive attitude continued into 1885 as evidenced by the tone of a letter to the group’s secretary, Octave Maus, written shortly before Les XX’s second salon: “You are very kind to inquire of my health. I am better. I still suffer a bit from indigestion, so now it is only tonic, exercise, and a little painting. How is it going with the invited artists?”27

Growing Discord As Les XX pushed out the group’s more conservative members, shifted the focus away from exhibiting Belgian artists, and began inviting international artists who shared their interests in new art and modernist practice, the group’s salons soon became an important venue for both displaying and selling art, eventually rivaling the Triennial Salon in importance. For Ensor, however, the growing prominence of Les XX in both Brussels and the contemporary art world, coupled with the evolving interests of the artist-members, and the internal dynamics of personal rivalries and collective action, eventually led to his diminished status and estrangement from the group. While Ensor’s early leadership had inspired confidential self-portraits and the sustaining friendly exchange of shared studios, models and drawing excursions, his belief in his own creative vision, social perspective, and artistic importance also led to conflicts. Ensor’s sense of entitlement became apparent in 1886 in his exchanges with Maus over a laudatory article (one of four) by Emile Verhaeren published in L’Art moderne on fellow Vingtist Fernand Khnopff.28 The warmth of his earlier letter to Maus cited above was replaced by cynical sarcasm as Ensor, referencing the characters in Emile Zola’s L’Œuvre (The Work), suggested that Khnopff could be Fagerolles and Ensor, Zola’s hero Claude Lantier: “Very good your silhouette on Fagerolles (Art moderne #36). Only Claude is not dead.”29 At the 1886 Les XX salon, Khnopff had received praise from the critics for his On Listening to Schuman, a work similar in subject to Ensor’s Russian Music also exhibited that year.30 While not accusing Khnopff of plagiarism or even copying his painting, Ensor’s comment reflected his enmity toward Khnopff and his intent to belittle him while also protesting Maus and Picard’s favoritism. In another letter written a week later, Ensor continued his complaints, his defensive and condescending comments revealing his growing awareness of Maus’s influence within Les XX. Despite a reaffirmation of his talent, Ensor saw Maus as a threat: Your rude letter distresses me. How can you judge me thus? Perhaps had you yielded to a spontaneous movement; my letter would not concern you. You firmly

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice defend Khnopff, from solid lines of friendship, perhaps of family, unified without a doubt with him. In this case, I do not blame you. Claude cannot be envious of Fagerolles. The future will decide and give to each his just place. Have I ever aimed for immediate success? It is written that the one who is humble will be raised up. I have confidence in myself and feel strong, the success of others does not trouble me.31

Although he was jealous of Khnopff, Ensor did not criticize Verhaeren, the author of the articles, or even mention him in his letter to Maus perhaps because Verhaeren had written favorably about Ensor in his review of the 1886 salon for Le Jeune Belgique. These exchanges indicate Ensor’s desire for more publicity for himself as well as discussion of the themes and ideas in his work and he hoped, perhaps, for an essay on his work in L’Art moderne similar to the one on Khnopff, or, for that matter, one like the journal’s defense of Félicien Rops after his etching, Pornokratés (1878, Belgium, Private collection) caused a scandal at the 1886 Vingtist salon. While Ensor’s standing with Les XX had declined, he nevertheless continued to assert his views, especially about the group’s need to support Belgian artists. Thus shortly after the publication of the series on Khnopff, when Maus asked for his opinion on the election of the American expatriate painter James Whistler (1834–1903) to Les XX, Ensor opposed it on nationalist grounds, saying that there were many important Belgians worthy of membership: Why admit Whistler? His painting seems already moldy and stuffy, he is known and recognized, what art and new principle can he bring us? If you believe in a good result for the public, do not forget that Whistler’s reputation, like ours, is detestable in the grocery shop. One finds him crazy, cracked-brained, peevish, full of conceit, and carrying false distinction. You see that his admission can add nothing to our situation before the public.32

­ espite his emphatic tone, more than any dislike of Whistler’s art and ideas, Ensor’s D comments reflected his hope to keep the group focused on native Belgian talent. Even though the group already had a Spanish member, Dario de Regoyos, and he had no problem the year before nominating the Dutchman Jan Toorop to replace the Greek founding member, Périclès Pantazis, Ensor argued that Whistler’s admission would mean admitting other non-Belgian artists and that membership should remain open to young Belgians. While Ensor’s point of view was eventually supported by his colleagues, his reply to Maus reveals the threat that the American posed to Ensor’s status and influence within Les XX. Whistler was denied admission to the group in 1886, but Ensor’s lessened position is evidenced by Finch’s vote to support Whistler’s membership. Several years later Ensor would change his view and vote for Whistler’s to be admitted to the group.33 For Ensor, the articles in L’Art moderne on Khnopff and Rops signaled a lack of support at Les XX, especially with the person with whom he was competing for leadership of the group, the Vingtist secretary, Octave Maus. Maus, whom Ensor had christened “the mandarin,” clearly enjoyed the power and prestige that came to him as

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secretary of Les XX. A wealthy haute-bourgeois lawyer, Freemason, progressive Liberal, and Wagner enthusiast, Maus’s bourgeois taste and refined manner were difficult for Ensor to accept. Although Ensor preferred the group remain a showcase for his work and that of other Belgian artists, by the mid-1880s, under Maus’s direction, supported by Verhaeren, Van Rysselberghe, and Finch, and others, Les XX increasingly turned their attention to the new art from Paris, especially that of George Seurat and his colleagues. Uninformed of this tilt toward Neo-Impressionism, Ensor continued his independent path. In 1887, the same year that Seurat exhibited Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte (1884, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago) at Les XX, Ensor confronted his fellow Vingtists with a series of personal and visionary drawings bearing the collective title Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light. Responding to those who had criticized his weak drawing skills and turning away from his realist and impressionist-oriented work, Ensor affirmed his drawing skills with six large drawings on view at Les XX’s third salon that presented his subjective interpretation of the life of Christ, interest in Rembrandt, and identity as a Belgian artist. At the same time as will be discussed in the next chapter, the topicality, scale, and execution of these drawings boldly signaled to Les XX, the critics, and the Belgian public, Ensor’s engagement with contemporary political and social issues. Ensor’s relationship to Les XX continued to be difficult. After he was excluded from an organizational meeting in December, 1887, Ensor asked Maus asked why he was not informed in a letter illustrated with a self-portrait of the artist standing with a skeletal figure of Death (Figure 1.19).34 When early in 1888 Ensor sent his list of works to Les XX’s annual salon, a postscript reflected his growing distrust of Maus: “Useless to tell you that I will not tolerate either changes, removal, or cutting of the titles.”35 This list, published in the 1888 Les XX catalog, mentioned fifteen paintings and seven drawings, including his large collage-drawing The Temptation of St. Anthony (Plate 20). Yet when the salon opened on the fourth of February, none of Ensor’s works were on display. Although several critics, including Hannon (writing under the pseudonym Mecœnas) claimed that under Maus’s influence Les XX now had a jury that had rejected Ensor’s artwork, but in actuality, Ensor, due to family circumstances including the death of his maternal grandmother and father, had not completed his submission in the time for the opening. Two weeks later, a selection of drawings and several etchings, most notably The Cathedral, were finally hung. More than likely, Maus took advantage of Ensor’s tardiness and blocked the exhibition of the bulk of the artist’s work. Since most critics had already written their reviews of the salon in the first week of the salon, Ensor’s work received little mention in the press. L’Art moderne, which had devoted an entire article to the work of the Neo-Impressionists Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) and Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846–1890) on view that year at Les XX, allowed only one brief paragraph on Ensor’s submission.36 Even if all the works listed in the 1888 catalog were later exhibited at Les XX salons, this “rejection” added to the artist’s disaffection from the group and developing selfidentification with Christ. Continuing the references to contemporary experience first explored in The Entry into Jerusalem, Ensor’s large canvas Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 had begun shortly after this “cabal” of 1888, transforms the worker’s demonstration of that drawing into a Mardi Gras procession taking place on a broad

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boulevard of present-day Brussels. Among other narratives that circulate in this painting that will be examined in the next chapter, the banner “Long Live the Social One” can also serve as a mocking and ironic comment on the “society” of Les XX, a group whose provocative promotional tactics but less than radical exhibition policies had failed to recognize Ensor’s individualism. Further underscoring his dissatisfaction, Ensor affixes the “Les XX” emblem to a small placard on a balcony in the upper left corner of Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. Directly above this banner, a masked figure defecates while another vomits, satirically figuring Ensor’s view of his colleagues at Les XX. Even his identification with Christ, now publicly proclaimed, can be understood as a wry reply to Octave Maus who had labeled Seurat as the “Messiah of the New Art.” In Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Ensor uses the traditional association of the biblical story of entry into Jerusalem, when Christ’s followers ceremonially heralded their new king, to supersede Les XX’s embrace of Seurat and the new religion of pointillism. Ensor implies that even though Christ (and his own) message have central importance to contemporary society, the crowd (including members of Les XX and the viewing public at their salon) is too involved with “doctrinal fanfares” and stylish fads, too infatuated with the modern spectacle and mass pleasure to support or even recognize either Ensor/Christ’s entry or the importance of his personal and expressive ideology. While Les XX will be one public that this painting addresses, the work also had a broader agenda, representing, as Chapter 3 will discuss, Ensor’s expressive critique of contemporary Belgian society. Yet, despite its large, history painting scale and subject matter that would have guaranteed a larger public review, Ensor did not send it to Les XX’s sixth exhibition or exhibit it until his first major retrospective 1929 at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels.37 While Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 remained rolled up in his studio, Ensor continued to send large numbers of paintings, drawings, and prints to the salons of Les XX: eighteen works in 1890; fifteen in 1891; fifteen again in 1892 and sixteen in 1893. Despite this impressive showing, relations with the group remained tense. Ensor later claimed that in 1890 several Vingtists sought to disqualify him from showing with the group and that he remained solely on the strength of his vote: “In 1890, a new cabal. Reactionary opposition and certain wretched pairs voted black. My consignment was accepted by the majority of one vote.”38 This rancor only strengthened Ensor’s resolve, however, and increasingly he turned to parody and satire. In 1890, he exhibited The Fall of the Rebellious Angels (Antwerp, KMSKA) at Les XX (cat. no. 2). In the lower right of this painting, an angel carrying a green banner with the Vingtist emblem painted in red alludes to the group’s fall from grace. The following year, Ensor showed Roman Triumph (KBR, Brussels, Print Room, inv. no. S IV 29334) at Les XX (cat. no. 9), a drawing that depicted an imperial procession marching in front of a vast Flemish landscape. Here Ensor insinuated that an imperial (that of Maus) and classical (French) orthodoxy has triumphed over native Belgian culture at Les XX. The drawing contains several references to Les XX, including a figure who carries a pole with the Vingtist emblem and another who carries a drum with this emblem on it. The artist also included windmills and steamships in the background to place the scene in contemporary Belgium.

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In 1892, Maus tried to block the display of The Wise Judges claiming later that he feared public outrage over the work would cause the government to close the exhibition. Edmond Picard, Maus’s co-editor at L’Art moderne, intervened, however, and the painting was shown as Ensor noted when writing to Maus later that year: Last year, when I sent to the Twenty “The Wise Judges” several members counseled me to withdraw this work (that) they found bad, even you I believe said it to me. And when Mr. Picard saw it, he found it very good and sincere and he congratulated me warmly and found it the best of my show; he had said the same thing to several people. Let’s give freedom to all. The artist before showing does not decide lightly. He is conscious of his responsibility and his judgement ought to be respected.39

In light of the close association of Maus and Picard with the official art world as well as the controversies that surrounded the exhibited work of the Vingtists Rops and Khnopff and works of invited artists Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh at other Les XX salons, Maus’s suggestion that there would be a public outcry over this painting seems doubtful. More likely, Maus was affronted by this painting with its allusion to a corrupt court and the legal establishment in which Maus (and, for that matter Picard), as a lawyer for the Court of Appeals, played a prominent role. Although Ensor persisted in exhibiting with the group, he was kept uninformed as to planning sessions, fellow exhibitors, the amount of space allotted, or even the dates of the salons. In October 1890, he wrote Maus: “Do you know the period of the Twenty exhibition? What goes on and who are invited in the rooms and the printing? I know nothing and I [am] anxious and uncertain, bristling and defiant.”40 The following year Ensor angrily reproached Maus for the autocratic manner in which he conducted the artistic and business affairs of the group.41 In 1893, when meetings are held to dissolve the group, Ensor was again excluded. Ironically, Ensor cast the sole vote to maintain the association.42 Ensor may have been isolated from the group and kept uninformed of meetings and votes, but he persisted nonetheless in sending work that challenged Les XX’s public stance of artistic radicalism, confronting contemporary audiences with his particular social critique. Even if Ensor’s strategy inspired critical disapproval, it also guaranteed attention and discussion of his artwork. Indeed his works were included in caricatures of the group’s salon in 1890 (Figure 2.15) and 1892.43 In other words, his work might have been controversial or even caused some discomfort among some of his colleagues, but it always garnered attention both positive and negative, supporting Les XX’s radical stance. In Dangerous Cooks (Plate 5) completed in 1896, three years after Les XX had disbanded, Ensor turns his fraught and complicated relationship with Maus into an allegorical tale in which he assumes the role of a persecuted and misunderstood modern-day John the Baptist. In this painting, a fishy meal of herring labeled “Art Ensor” (hareng saur), is about to be served by Maus to a table of critics seated in the next room while nearby Edmond Picard cooks the head of Guillaume Vogels in a frying pan. The Vingtists Théo van Rysselberghe, Anna Boch (1848–1936), Georges

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 2.15  Anon. “Le Salon des XX”, Le Patriote Illustré, 55 (February 2, 1890), (bottom right: “Un ‘coin’ du Salon” (with Astonishment of the Mask Wouse), Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience B 70783 (photo: © Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library)

Lemmen (1865–1916), Charles van der Stappen (1843–1910), and Henri de Groux (1866–1930), depicted as hybrid human and animal caricatures on the wall and the floor, await their turn to become the next meal. In the next room numerous contemporary critics gather around a table awaiting their food. Édouard Fétis, Eugène Demolder, and Camile Lemonnier sit, plates, forks, and bibs at the ready, even as Max Sulzberger and Emile Verhaeren vomit onto their plates and Théo Hannon runs up the stairs with a case of diarrhea, only to have a chamber pot dumped on his head. Using such obvious farcical and allegorical devices as the curtain at the upper right, the simultaneous events occurring in the kitchen and dining hall, even the strange hybrid artist creatures and the critic’s reactions, Ensor sets the stage for a broad theatrical travesty. He includes both his supporters—Verhaeren, Hannon, Demolder, and Lemonnier had all championed the artist in a their writings—and his detractors—Maus, Sulzberger, and Fétis—making it clear that whatever their disposition, these men cannot digest such a rich diet of modern art, especially the “Art Ensor” about to be served. Pillorying the pretension of Picard and Maus who viewed themselves as impresarios of modern Belgian art, Ensor transforms them into bad or “dangerous” cooks with he and his colleagues becoming culinary delicacies that can never satisfy the hungry critics. By labeling his own dish and placing it at the compositional juncture between the two spaces of presentation and reception, Ensor underscores his central position in the Belgian avant-garde. While his art might be a tasty dish, Ensor implies it could provoke physical disorders, even intestinal distress and diarrhea. Sanctioning his vision and witty critique even as he roasts modernism and the Belgian art world, Ensor has the last laugh performing the role of ironic victim as folly reigns overall.

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While Ensor’s depiction of Maus as a “dangerous” cook alludes to the artist’s view of Maus’s dominance of Les XX and their difficult and sometimes testy relationship, his inclusion of Picard suggests an affiliation based on mutual respect and shared politics. Already a prominent lawyer when Ensor first met him in the early 1880s, Picard championed a radical, revolutionary role for artists and writers. As a cofounder of L’Art moderne, Picard often defended Les XX and published numerous anonymous essays on social art and one of his principal causes, a national Belgian art. As a progressive Liberal and later as a Socialist senator and member of the court at the Palace of Justice in Brussels, Picard championed legal reform and leftist causes. Along with art criticism, Picard also composed poetry and wrote several plays. As noted earlier, Picard, as a patron of the arts, regularly organized salons at his art-filled Brussels home that later became a gallery, the Maison d’Art (House of Art), and theater space. Like other colleagues at Les XX, Ensor was invited to attend these salons that often included lectures, poetry readings, and concerts and it was at the Maison d’Art that he saw a staging of Picard’s symbolist play/poem The Juror accompanied by a display of Odilon Redon’s prints. Like the Rousseau family, Picard’s radicalism and progressive agenda encouraged Ensor’s engagement with anarcho-socialist ideas, especially in the 1880s, but it was Picard’s support that the artist most appreciated. As noted in Chapter 1, Ensor sought Picard’s advice about the copyright suit brought against Ensor’s family, offering for compensation his deep gratitude or a drawing or painting noting: “I am always told that you have a lot of sympathy for me, that you are almighty and ready to smash things up (mettez tout en marmalade).”44 Ensor remained on friendly terms with Picard who owned three etchings by the artist. Occasionally in the late 1890s, Ensor’s works were on display at Picard’s Maison d’Art gallery, and he later collaborated on several projects. Picard assisted with the purchase of Sick Tramp Trying to Warm Himself by the Belgian state, placing the painting on depot at his home in Brussels despite Ensor’s concerns that it might be offensive.45 In 1902 Ensor was elected to the Libre Académie de Belgique, founded by Picard, his nomination supported by many prominent writers and progressive politicians including Demolder, Verhaeren, and Maus. The next year, Picard published Psukè (Greek for “the soul”) a “Dialogue for the Act in One Act and Nine Scenes” about a banquet where one of the guests is a painter named Max Korsor who identifies with Hieronymus Bosch and ardently defends his work. Korsor is of course Ensor and the artist even performed as this painter wearing a Bosch suit when the play was presented in Ostend on August 17, 1906. Ensor may have poked fun at Picard’s ambition in Dangerous Cooks but their relationship would prove beneficial for each—Picard offered important validation and Ensor affirmed Picard’s radical credentials for as Astrid Herkens put it: “Celebrating the ensorian provocation allows Picard to add a string to his subversive bow.”46 Even if he vetted his view of Maus with his sarcastic Dangerous Cooks, two years later in 1898 Ensor asked Maus to contribute an essay to the special publication of La Plume that accompanied his first one-man show in Paris at the Salon des Cent. Maus’s essay praised Ensor’s vision: “His sound and shrewd eye, the sureness of his hand whose ability reveals itself in many drawings of prestigious virtuosity, and many etchings at once powerful and delicate.”47 Calling Ensor a provocateur who threatened the art establishment, Maus, now lauded the very work he previously had tried to block

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at Les XX noting the kind of reaction Ensor’s work provoked: “impossible to show similar artists! The floor will come down! The government will close the exhibition! Voting with hands and canes raised within the amusing brouhaha of which the echo, notwithstanding the years passed, still echoes joyously in my ears.”48 Maus’s comments imply that he was the one taking risks by showing Ensor, a view that embellishes his role at Les XX. Even if the actuality of Maus’s support and his relationship with Ensor was quite different from this published testimonial, it nevertheless advanced the artist’s agenda by reinforcing the public’s perception of him as a satirical avant-garde agitator. No doubt the prospect of sales and an established venue for exhibiting his work lay behind Ensor’s vote to keep Les XX intact and the same motivation led him to send work, despite his antagonistic relationship with Maus, to La Libre Esthétique the exhibition society Maus formed and controlled after Les XX dissolved in 1893. From 1894 to 1898, and again in 1900, 1905, 1908, and the final salon in 1914, Ensor was invited to exhibit at La Libre Esthétique and sold several works there. Despite Maus’s participation in La Plume and his invitations to Ensor to exhibit at La Libre Esthétique and in the Belgian section of the 1900 Universal Exhibition, Ensor remained critical of Maus as a letter written to Théo Hannon in 1904 makes clear. Outraged that Maus was planning a retrospective exhibition on Impressionism at La Libre Esthétique but had only invited Théo van Rysselberghe to exhibit, Ensor asserted to Hannon that he was the first Belgian Impressionist and that his pivotal role had been overlooked with his omission yet one more example of Maus’s favoritism: The suave Maus’s partiality really is beyond all bounds. At the dawn of impressionism, when the volleys were raining down on Les XX this masked pretty boy was quick to attach the label impressionist to the works of experimental artists. As the title is now worn with pride and profitable, this incorrigible chestnutchewer has taken it away from us. Arthur Stevens used to show outrageous favor to French artists, he scorned Boulanger, de Groux, Dubois, Agnessens, etc., etc. Dear Old Maus is playing the same little game, distorting and diminishing the experiments of true painters to benefit the work of his friends. I want to give you my impression, my dear Théo, Maus’s autocracy, though hard-wearing, is infinitely displeasing me.49

Even with someone like Maus who he distrusted, Ensor knew better than to sever any affiliation that might benefit him. Ensor’s relationship with Les XX was reciprocal and not without irony. He learned about publicity and subversive tactics from reading L’Art moderne and participating in Les XX’s salons, lessons that he assimilated into his art practice. L’Art moderne published many articles promoting Les XX’s artists and salons. As Ensor’s own provocative and satirical “Three Weeks at the Academy” made clear, its editors supported Ensor’s tactics when he was considered a young, radical Realist and they were intent on positioning Les XX as an anarchistic “carrier of the new.” Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s Ensor used these same strategies of confrontation at Les XX—purposefully sending work that would perpetuate his importance, display the depth of his talent and range of subjects, and engage the Belgian public in debates over contemporary art, politics,

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and society. Even if Ensor felt isolated from the group, especially as his relationship with Maus grew strained, the artistic milieu centered around Les XX remained central to his art practice and career. In turn, Ensor’s presence and regular participation lent Les XX an avant-garde prestige that was mutually beneficial, as fellow Vingtist George Lemmen acknowledged in 1895: But one cannot fail to see and it is right to recall the immense influence that M. Ensor—and with his disciple Willy Finch—had for a while over most of us and over some who have since developed and whose personalities have come to the fore. This influence was felt by M. Toorop more than any other and it even extended to M. Khnopff, who owed to it perhaps his best work, Listening to Schumann.50

This aspect of influence and mutual aid continued even after Les XX disbanded. With perhaps the exception of Fernand Khnopff, Ensor remained on amicable terms with many of his former colleagues in Les XX. Most of his communications related to exhibition opportunities, sales of his work, or promotion of his art, but Ensor and his fellow members continued the collective spirit and networking of Les XX by promoting each other’s careers through the organizing of exhibitions and introductions to collectors who might be interested in purchases. Ensor, for example, invited Jan Toorop to the first salon of the Cercle des Beaux-Arts in Ostend and then asked Toorop if he could participate in the exhibition Toorop had organized in The Hague in 1895. Toorop introduced the collector, W.J.H. Leuring to Ensor’s work at Le Libre Esthétique and after Leuring purchased Ensor’s Dead Rooster (1894, Mannheim, Stadtishe Kunsthalle) at that exhibit, Ensor wrote a grateful and flattering letter to his Vingtist colleague.51

Beyond Les XX: Recognition and Support The Brussels art world and particularly the social and artistic network of Les XX nurtured Ensor’s art practice and career, providing friendships and mutual support, a tradition and context for his art, exhibition opportunities, and individual colleagues to work with or against. Through the Les XX salons he reached a larger public and, importantly, by selling his work, he could gain the respect of and some economic independence from his mercantile-oriented family. As well, Ensor’s connections with the Brussels art community and L’Art moderne taught him the importance of publicity and self-promotion and ways to influence the critical reception of his art, strategies that he would maintain after Les XX disbanded and he continued his solo career. Ensor’s colleagues and his many friendships helped shape the public reception of his art and ideas through their writings and publications on his work. Emile Verhaeren, one of the earliest writers to recognize Ensor’s talent, almost always mentioned his work in reviews. He may have been critical of Ensor’s compositional skills and tendency toward fantasy and less interested in his satirical work, but Verhaeren consistently praised Ensor’s visionary individualism, abilities as a colorist, and sensitive depiction of light, attributes, that, in the writer’s view, set him apart. Ensor’s portrait of Verhaeren

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painted in 1890 (Plate 10) exhibited at the 1892 Les XX salon testifies to their mutual regard. Ensor portrays Verhaeren seated in his book-filled study taking a break from his writing by sharpening a pencil. Like his earlier portraits of Théo Hannon, Willy Finch, and Mariette Rousseau, Ensor combines description—Verhaeren’s emblematic long mustache and pince-nez glasses are quite recognizable—with a representation that highlights the reciprocal nature of their relationship. As in other portraits, Ensor defines his sitter’s occupation, in this case as both a writer, as the books on the table and windowsill make clear, and collector, as can be seen from the paintings on the wall (the top one with its masks even suggests one of Ensor’s works). Signing his own name on a sheet of paper in the foreground, Ensor implies that he is seated in the foreground opposite the writer whose name is written on the wall along with the compass, a possible allusion to Verhaeren’s affiliation with the Freemasons. Drawing the critic’s and viewer’s attention on the task at hand—sharpening his pencil—Ensor acknowledges Verhaeren’s astuteness as a critic and admirer of the artist’s work. Verhaeren, in turn, published a monograph on the artist in 1908. Although Ensor knew Verhaeren professionally, having met him through Edmond Picard or at one of Les XX’s salons, he knew the young Belgian lawyer, writer, and art critic Eugène Demolder personally, having been introduced by Félicien Rops (whose daughter Claire married Demolder in 1895). In 1892 Demolder, published the first monograph on the artist and two years later he organized a one-person show of Ensor’s work in Brussels at his father’s store, Comptoir Arts Industriels La Royale. In conjunction with the exhibition, Demolder also published several articles that promoted the artist’s ideas and work.52 In addition to including him in Dangerous Cooks, Ensor made two portraits of Demolder, an 1893 painting and an 1895 etching, Fridolin and Gragapança of Yperdamme (T95, D.94, Cr. 95, E. 97) based on an 1891 drawing. The etching, which depicts Ensor playing the flute as Demolder dances, alludes to their close friendship and Demolder’s Les Contes d’Yperdamme (The Songs of Yperdamme) of 1891 and La Légende de Yperdamme (The Legend of Yperdamme) of the same year. Yperdamme was Demolder’s mythical setting for his account of the adventures of Saint Fridolin, a flutecarrying saint whose description closely resembles that of Ensor and whose role the artist assumes in the etching with Demolder posing as Gragapança, count of Flanders. As Stephen Goddard has noted in his discussion of this print, Demolder’s account of Fridolin may have been a reference to the Flemish author Jan Bruylandt’s farcical 1864 “volksdrama” Fridolien and thus Ensor’s treatment can also be seen as an allusion to their common Flemish heritage.53 In the print, Ensor represents the reciprocal relationship between the artist and the critic, playing his flute with a copy in his pocket of Demolder’s essay published in the Ostend newspaper Le Libre Critique describing Ensor as both a painter and musician, as the writer dances to the artist’s tune. Ensor references Demolder’s interest in Flemish primitivism and medieval art in his 1893 portrait of the writer originally titled Icon (Plate 11). Unlike Verhaeren who Ensor portrays as a writer and critic, Demolder’s representation is hieratic and symbolic with his head surrounded by a nimbus, face with open eyes and closed lips, and hand raised in a blessing. The blue-faced demons on either side act as a frame, their grotesque and pustulated faces a marked contrast to the detailed delineation of the

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critic’s features. Above these figures, Ensor painted scenes from the last days of Christ’s life—at the left, his entry into Jerusalem, mockery in the center, and crucifixion on the far right—surrounded by elaborate cartouches and painted with bright colors in a flat and linear style reminiscent of an illuminated manuscript. At the top, Ensor includes a reproduction of Stephan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower, a depiction of Mary holding Christ on her lap. Painted a year after Demolder published his monograph on Ensor, this portrait connects the writer to an iconic, symbolic, and spiritual realm, one that also alludes to Ensor’s own identification with Christ. In the monograph, Demolder stresses Ensor’s nationalist context and contemporary relevance. Describing the artist as “a skinny Don Quixote” with a sarcastic sense of humor, a preoccupation with color and light, and ties to Flemish art, Ensor becomes, in Demolder’s essay, the quintessential Flemish artist who joins the color palette of Rubens and the Flemish Primitives with the earthy, satirical legacy of Rembrandt and Goya. As leader of the Belgian avant-garde and the “Apostle of Impressionism”, Ensor is, in Demolder’s view, an innovator who studied the effects of light before all others, including Monet and Seurat, and painted with a “raw naturalism” that lent significance to both the material world of things and his social milieu. Refused from official salons, misunderstood by critics and superseded by the cool and analytic Neo-Impressionism, Ensor turns to Rabelaisian humor and fantastic imaginary transforming his early work into a “comic carnival of the sidewalk.” In his later work, Ensor mixes satire and reality to form a sarcastic critique of his contemporaries who again fail to recognize his significance. Demolder ends his monograph with a description of Ensor as an isolated visionary who lives in an attic surrounded by his work, reading Balzac and Poe, “searching within the murmur of his neighbor the sea and his own emphatic anger for the grandiose echo of Wagner’s music.”54 Written in support and as a defense of the artist, Demolder’s monograph advances the narrative that has since become the standard interpretation of Ensor’s career: that, despite his pioneering efforts and significant role in modern Belgian art, Ensor had been misunderstood and betrayed by his contemporaries. This account transforms Ensor’s art career into modernist myth, the prototypical tale of talent and alienation that the artist propagated in self-portraits and later writings and lectures. It is certainly the image presented to the Paris public when in 1898 he re-worked his 1888 Demons Teasing Me, a drawing made during the most estranged period of his relations with Les XX where he is surrounded by grotesque monsters, into the poster for the Salon des Cent exhibition organized by Demolder. While Demolder’s essay perpetuates romantic notions of the suffering artist, it contrasts with the actuality of Ensor’s life discussed in detail in this chapter. He may have been kept uninformed about Les XX’s latter salons, due in part to his strained relationship with Maus, but Ensor is not isolated in Ostend, and his critical reception includes both supporters and detractors. He is in touch with numerous friends, including members of Les XX, and travels often. He lives briefly in Brussels and visits frequently throughout the 1880s and 1890s. During this same period, he also travels to England probably in 1886, and again in 1892 and 1905 to settle his paternal grandmother’s estate. Ensor had visited Paris at least once before in 1884 with Jan

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Toorop and quite possibly earlier in 1882 when his paintings were shown at the Paris Salon. He goes to Paris again in 1889 before visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau in 1896. He also visits Lille in 1884 and Zeeland and the Netherlands with Demolder in 1891 and again in 1895 along with trips to Ghent, Bruges and other Belgian cities in the late 1880s and early 1890s. These trips, especially his frequent visits to Brussels, contradict the narrative that Ensor never left Ostend and was isolated from his contemporary peers. Remarks by his friends, however, told a different story, one that suggests that even if Ensor was not the center of Les XX as he had been in the early 1880s, he nonetheless remained a lively even entertaining presence in artistic and literary circles. The writer August Vermeylen (1872–1945) recalled an evening celebrating carnival with the artist: Went out with Ensor, Ensor the caricultural, the painter of the Mardi Gras of costumed humanity! We were all mad, sick in the head! I cannot relate this epic to you. . . . I shall tell you only that last night—this morning—we were out wandering with a live pig, won in a tombola!! . . . Oh St. Anthony!55

As this story suggests, Ensor enjoyed mischievous acts, the camaraderie of colleagues, a good feast or party, jokes, and dressing up. His participation in the Rat Mort (Dead Rat) society provides a view into Ensor’s public presence. Formed by members of the Ostend Circle Coecilia (including Ensor) who had discovered the Rat Mort café in Montmartre on an 1896 trip to Paris, the group decided to organize an annual philanthropic masquerade Ball of the Dead Rat, with the first event held in 1898. As an active member of the “Company of the Dead Rat,” Ensor designed posters, participated in the dinners, and gave speeches, his participation at these costume balls recorded in photographs with Ensor often seated at the center.56 Other writers were spreading Ensor’s fame as well. In 1895, Pol de Mont published the first essay in Dutch on the artist in the Antwerp-based journal, De Vlaamishe School, and the writer Eugene Georges wrote a flattering article on Ensor in 1896.57 More international attention followed: in 1900 Vittorio Pica wrote a study of Ensor for the Italian magazine Minerva and that same year the Austrian art historian Friedrich Dörnhöfer published an article in the Viennese Die Graphischen Künste.58 By the late 1890s, Ensor’s reputation had expanded beyond Belgium’s borders. In 1895, he exhibited for the first time in The Hague at an international invitational exhibition organized by members of the Haagsche Kunstkring that, as mentioned earlier, Jan Toorop helped to arrange. In 1898, fifty-five of his drawings and etchings were shown at the Salon des Cent in Paris in an exhibition initiated by Demolder with the assistance of Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934). In conjunction with this exhibition, the art journal La Plume published an issue on Ensor’s art that included the essays by Maus and Picard, Verhaeren and Hannon, along with other art critics and writers, and the internationally known authors Maurice Maeterlinck and Camille Mauclair. In addition to these endeavors, Ensor actively sought out ways to market and sell his work. In addition to offering favorable discounts, Ensor placed his work with several dealers and supporters, negotiated prices, requested payment, and suggested possible

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exchanges of works between collectors as is clear in a letter to the Rousseaus who were avid collectors along with Mariette’s brother Edouard: If you don’t mind, send me two hundred francs as I have a few little bills to pay in Ostend and I have to buy colours and copper plates. I have a few still lifes left. I will let the Meat exhibited at Picard’s on Avenue de la Toison d’Or, marked at eight hundred francs, go to Monsieur Ėdouard [Hannon] for 650 francs as I have to pay at least 15 percent on the sale. The Oysters at Mr. Buésco’s, rue de Ligne 2, marked at the same price, can also go for 650 frs. Lastly for Meadow flowers, which you saw at the Ostend Salon, I’m asking 500 frs. The painter Charlet [Franz Charlet)] promised to buy the painting from me next December, he thought it the best in the exhibition. It’s a painting in portrait format measuring around 120 by 90. There’s also Chinoiseries at Mr. Leroy’s, place du Musée. You might have seen this painting at my exhibition at Demolder’s. I’m asking 1200 frs. for it. It’s also in portrait format, measuring 100 by 80 unframed.59

He also contacted interested buyers such as the collector Henri Van Cutsem (1839–1904), to whom he had sold several drawings, offering other work for consideration.60 Ensor reached out as well to those who had bought his work, like the bookseller and publisher Edmond Deman (1857–1918) who had bought his Adoration of the Shepherd (1887, Brussels, MRBAB) with offers of additional works.61 He also contacted other artists whom he had met about possibilities for presenting his work or getting it published, asking, for example, for the advice of German painter Max Stremel (1859–1928) about sending etchings and some drawings to Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910) a German writer and editor of Die Insel where Ensor hoped to reproduce his work.62 This letter produced results as Ensor’s 1886 etching The Orchard in an edition of two hundred was included in an album of prints published by Die Insel in 1900. Ensor was constantly promoting his career, seeking exhibition opportunities wherever he could. Thus, even if he had protested Les XX’s break-up, he readily accepted Maus’s invitation to show at Le Libre Esthétique. He also cofounded with his printer Georges Daveluy and the architect Antoine Dujardin (1848–1933), Le Cercle des Beaux-Arts and invited several former Vingtists to exhibit while also displaying his own work. Along with exhibiting regularly with this group and at La Libre Esthétique, Ensor also showed with Les XIII in Antwerp in 1898, and occasionally invited to send work to Le Table Ronde, an exhibition society in Louvain. In addition to these exhibitions, Ensor showed seven paintings and three drawings at an exhibition of Les XX held in Ghent at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in April 1893; two works at the 1894 Triennial Salon in Antwerp; four works at the International Exhibition in Brussels in 1897; fifty-two prints at a two-person exhibition with Edmond Verstraeten at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in 1899; six works at the centennial exhibition of the School of Decorative Arts held in Brussels in 1900, and that same year sent A Colorist to the Universal and International Exhibition in Paris. But for someone who usually sent a large selection of works to Les XX, these exhibitions included only smaller numbers of works and thus provided fewer

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opportunities to sell or connect with collectors. In addition to looking for new venues, Ensor also considered other ways to show and market his work, leaving paintings and prints with collectors, art dealers, and galleries including Edmond Picard’s Maison d’Art, the shop of antique dealer and restorer Paul Buésco, Évely’s printshop, and an art gallery near the museum run by Mr. LeRoy. As well, he made small editions of his etchings, occasionally adding watercolor and pastel, to transform them into unique and thus more valuable monotypes, and often producing a print “to order” if there was the possibility of a sale. Since prints were inexpensive to produce and acquire, they became a way for Ensor to attract interested patrons and promote his work. He offered discounts and even gave away prints as gifts to supporters like Demolder. For the exhibition at Salon des Cent and the special edition of La Plume, Ensor offered its publisher Léon Deschamps (1863–1899) a discounted edition of his etchings as an enticement for taking on the project. An 1897 letter to the French-Romanian painter Constantin Ganesco (1864–1940) who had bought several small paintings from the artist provides insight into the way Ensor promoted himself and his work, making an offer that Ganesco could hardly refuse: I’m sending you a few sketches, large and small, and some etchings that have been coloured. Please choose, for I couldn’t make a choice …. Here are the prices. The coloured etchings, 20 francs. The large drawings, 20 francs. The small ones, 5 francs. I’ve also added an etching, The Cathedral which I would like you to accept. It isn’t the cathedral you know. I found the strength to make a precise copy of the cathedral on a new plate. It isn’t exactly the same as the other one, the bite is different and it is much less detailed, but I am sending it to you as a curious proof and as a gift. Please accept it as I would like to give it to you.63

To circulate his work to a broader public, Ensor also looked for opportunities to have his work, especially his prints, reproduced in journals. In 1890, Valère Gille (1867–1950) asked for a print for publication in La Jeune Belgique and eventually reproduced a photo engraving of The Cathedral as the frontispiece for the February 1891 issue. In May 1891, Ensor exhibited prints at the Dietrich house in Brussels where his first lithograph, Hop-Frog’s Revenge, was on display. That same month, La Jeune Belgique announced the publication and availability of this lithograph after Poe in an edition of ten.64 In a similar strategy, in 1893 Ensor wrote to Vermeylen, one of the editors of the avant-garde literary journal Van nu en Straks, about publishing a drawing. The letter shows Ensor’s shrewd marketing skills as he lists different types of work and notes that the more satirical pieces might appeal to this journal’s subscribers. He then discusses his concerns about the quality of reproduction, making it clear that only a clean and strong graphic image would look good and reflect Van Nu en Straks aesthetic. After an exchange of letters, a heliogravure of Ensor’s 1886 drawing The Devils Dzitts and Hihahox Commanded by Crazon Riding a Furious Cat, Leading Christ to Hell (Brussels, MRBAB) was reproduced in the journal in 1894 and offered for sale as part of an edition of “twelve deluxe copies.” That same year Demolder wrote an article on Ensor for Le Diable-au-Corps in which he discussed The Cathedral as a “masterpiece of

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prodigious and fantastic imagination” that shows “epic grandeur”. A print of Roman Triumph, which in Demolder’s view “had heroic aspect in all its oddness,” was offered to subscribers as a gift.65 While the socialist journal Le Coq Rouge (whose editorial staff included Demolder and Verhaeren) did not offer a print to its subscribers, it did announce the publication of Ensor’s album of Twelve Etchings by Van Campenhout (and on view at his shop on the Chaussée de Wavre in Brussels), in its March–April 1896 issue. Ensor also sought to place his work in museum collections. In February 1895 he wrote to Jules de Burlet, Minister of the Interior and Education, asking permission to submit his work to the acquisition committee of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Requesting 2,500 francs for The Lamplighter, Ensor once again promoted himself, noting in his letter that his work had been well reviewed, with several publications stating that it deserved to be in a museum and worthy of acquisition by the government. The painting was purchased for the stated amount the following month, becoming the first painting of Ensor’s acquired by a Belgian museum. In 1898, he also sought out Edmond Picard’s assistance in getting the Belgian state to buy his 1882 painting Sick Tramp Trying to Warm Himself which was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts (now Mu.ZEE) in Ostend. His effort at placing the Oyster Eater in a public collection was more difficult. In 1908 the Liège town council decided against purchasing the painting despite the support of Emile Verhaeren and several artists. That same year, Antwerp collectors Emma and Albin Lambotte bought the painting and in 1927 sold it and five other works to the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. By the mid-nineties, Ensor’s promotional efforts began to pay off: in December 1892 the Print Cabinet of the Royal Library in Brussels bought twenty- five etchings, twenty-five more in May 1895, and another twenty-one in December 1895. After the Kuperstichkabinett in Dresden bought sixteen etchings at the Cercle des Beaux-Arts in 1894, Ensor wrote the director Max Lehrs to thank him. The following year he wrote Lehrs again. After noting that the Brussels print cabinet had bought several etchings, Ensor offered to send him twenty-five proofs of his prints with a price of fifteen francs a proof. Twenty-five more prints soon entered the Dresden collection.66 In 1899 the Albertina Museum in Vienna purchased approximately one hundred of his etchings for four hundred francs. In addition to its acquisition of Sick Tramp Trying to Warm Himself, the city of Ostend bought 188 prints in 1901. Perhaps his largest self-promotion came with the publication of the special issue of La Plume. While Demolder had initiated the project, Ensor made every effort to make the issue a success. Deschamps had already published a special issue on Félicien Rops in 1896 and Demolder thought that an exhibition and issue on Ensor would be a good opportunity to introduce his art to Paris. Demolder left the project after a falling out with Deschamps and Ensor soon assumed control of the publication and exhibition, contacting many of the writers and astutely negotiating many of the details for both the exhibition at the Salon des Cent and the La Plume issue. He changed the dates (from October, a month, according to Ensor not favorable for sales), insisted on Deschamps’s receiving only ten percent of the sales, and inquired on the types of frames (Ensor preferred white frames). Ensor requested that Deschamps pay for the reproduction of the poster, program, and invitation for the exhibition and assume the

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framing costs for which he would be compensated by essays from distinguished writers and successful sales of the special issue in Belgium. Ensor also offered Deschamps three complete editions of his prints (100 in each edition for a total of 300 prints) for a thousand francs. He even provided photographic and glass slide reproductions of the works to be included in the issue, promising to add more as he believed that prints would sell well in Paris. Although Ensor preferred to include more French writers, he justified the predominance of Belgian authors to Deschamps with the promise of increased sales of the journal in Belgium.67 In several cases, Ensor suggested to the authors the topic for their essays or provided information on his art and career, even recommending Demolder’s monograph to some, so they could write promotional or flattering articles. Many of the essays in La Plume portray Ensor as a subversive revolutionary who had enlisted his talents to enrich the cause of modern Belgian art. His request to Hannon was direct and rooted in their long friendship: I demand of you a sonnet with a gracious title! You can idealize the Scandalized Masks, Skeletons, Drunkards, Disagreeable Beggars, Cathedrals, Triumphs, Clowning Devils, Good Judges, Bad Doctors, Tormented Christ, Views taken in Phnosie, etc., etc. You know all my works perfectly, you, my first defender.68

Despite this effort to influence public opinion and generate sales and even though the reviews were generally favorable, the Salon des Cent show was a disappointment. According to Demolder, there were few visitors and of the fifty-five works on view Ensor sold only one print for 33.25 francs. Equally disappointing, the special edition of La Plume met with slow sales (the first edition was printed in six facsimiles with numbers 1 and 2 appearing on October 15, 1898, and the sixth on December 15, 1898. These individual editions were subsequently assembled into a separate publication). Despite Ensor’s guarantee of high sales and his promise to Deschamps that paying the production costs for the exhibition would be compensated by these sales, many copies remained unsold at the end of the exhibition, ending up in second-hand bookstores and book bins along the Seine. As with this issue of La Plume, Ensor continued, to actively promote Demolder’s representation of his art and career. When Pol de Mont wrote to Ensor asking for information for the article in De Vlaamishe School, the artist first referred him to Demolder’s monograph and then proceeded to write his own chronology and interpretation of his career. In this letter, Ensor acknowledges the role that negative criticism had played in his artistic production: Sometimes the lively attacks of the critics muddled my convictions and I suffered from a lot of doubt (my character is extremely impressionable and susceptible), but they have been utilized because then I studied more attentively the most opposed way of doing things in order to continue finally my research of light.69

Even if Ensor admitted that bad reviews helped him to focus while increasing sales and providing the recognition and status he had sought for so long, as the Salon des Cent

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poster makes clear, he continued to represent himself publicly as an alienated artist, but now added a cock in a halo above his head that, for some, symbolized his triumph in France.70 After the turn of the century, Ensor began receiving the kind of recognition he long thought was his due, including purchases by official institutions and appointment as a chevalier to the Order of Leopold. He also met Emma Lambotte (1878–1963) a writer and critic and her husband Albin, who become his patrons, purchasing twenty works for their collection including the controversial Oyster Eater. Lambotte introduced Ensor to the entrepreneur and art collector François Franck (1872–1932) who also bought several of Ensor’s paintings from the 1880s and later donated thirteen works to the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts. Franck had studied at the Antwerp Royal Academy and later in Paris where he discovered the Arts and Crafts movement and the theories of John Ruskin and William Morris. Returning to Antwerp, he established with his brothers François, Charles (1875–1930) and Louis (1869–1937) the Maison Franck Frères. Strong supporters of the arts, the Franck brothers formed, along with writer and Flemish socialist leader Emmanuel de Bom (1868–1953), Jef Overloop (1878–1949), and Walter Vaes (1882–1958), the society De Kapel in 1903 that combined exhibitions of modern art, concerts, and lectures with discussions of anarcho-socialist theory and symbolist literature. In 1905 the Franck brothers and others formed the exhibition society Kunst van Heden/L’Art contemporain (Art of the Present) to show contemporary art in Antwerp. Ensor, who assisted with the organization, exhibited twenty paintings at the group’s inaugural salon. In addition to these Antwerp exhibition societies, Ensor co-founded and participated in the salons of the Ostend-based Cercle des Beaux-Arts and also joined the Brussels-based Vie et Lumière group. Exhibitions at these venues as well as Le Libre Esthétique’s salons introduced Ensor to a younger generation of artists including Rik Wouters (1882–1916) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956) who appreciated his use of color and his fresh and direct approach to contemporary subjects. By the first years of the twentieth century, Ensor’s circle had expanded greatly, into a network of collectors, writers, and patrons who promoted his work by publishing his letters, writing monographs, and developing projects and exhibitions or commissioning work from the artist. One such project that reflects the sort of patronage Ensor enjoyed in his later years was François Franck’s plan to have him illustrate a copy of Stephan Mallarmé’s Poésies that had been originally published in 1899 (Brussels: E. Deman). Although initially reluctant to pursue this proposed project, eventually Ensor was inspired and produced seventy-six drawings to accompany Mallarmé’s text. While the planned publication never appeared, Ensor exhibited his illustrations at his 1929 retrospective. Les Poésies was not published until a facsimile edition was printed in 1998. Ensor continued to actively promote his own work, seeking out exhibition opportunities and using agents like Augusta Boogaerts or Eugène Demolder to bring work to shows or order prints that he would hand color and offer for sale. The 1929 retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels exhibited almost all his artistic production up until that time. That same year he was given the honorary title of Baron by Leopold II. The Brussels retrospective was followed by another major exhibition in

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Paris in 1932 and as well as important shows in Holland, Italy, Germany, the United States, and England and group shows throughout Europe.71 In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Tribulations of St. Anthony, becoming the first American museum to acquire a work by Ensor. As he became more known, Ensor regularly received artists in Ostend including Henry van de Velde (a fellow member of Les XX), Jean Brusselmans, Louis Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, Wassily Kandinsky, Emile Nolde, Édouard Vuillard, and many others. Even with his growing fame and the support of an ever-expanding circle of patrons and colleagues, Ensor persisted in representing himself as isolated in his studio as seen in his The Skeleton Painter (1896) (Figure 1.16) or surrounded by masks as in Self-Portrait with Masks (1899) (Plate 4). Moreover, despite the expanding market for his work, especially for his prints, Ensor’s art production slowed. While he made fewer paintings, after 1912 Ensor became increasingly preoccupied with his ballet, La Gamme d’Amour (The Scale of Love). He began composing music for this project in 1906 after the Lambottes gave him a harmonium. Even though he referenced music in several of his paintings, Ensor’s enthusiasm exceeded, however, his limited musical abilities. He had little or no musical training, could neither read nor write a score and, unconventionally, played the harmonium mainly on the black keys using flat, stiff fingers. After he wrote the scenario for his ballet he wisely sought collaboration with musicians Michel Brusselmans (1886–1960) and Georges Vriamont (1896– 1961) who scored and revised the composition.72 Eventually, the project evolved into a sort of gesamtkunstwerk as in addition to the music and text, Ensor designed the costumes and stage set. He was also instrumental in getting the work Gamme d’Amour produced, turning once again to his friends and colleagues for collaboration including Franz Hellens (1881–1972) who first announced the ballet in L’Art moderne, André de Ridder (1888–1961), and Peter-Gabriel Van Hecke (1887–1967) who had founded the gallery and art magazine Sélection and published a limited edition of his writings that included the scenario for the ballet, and François Franck who helped to finance the production. Eventually, the ballet received an initial staging at the Gallery Giroux in Brussels in 1920.73 A larger, grander performance took place at the Flemish Royal Opera in Antwerp in 1924 as Romance of the Marionnettes (Poppenliefde), choreographed by Sonai Korty with Flor Bosman conducting, staging by Fé De Ryckx and Bernard Tokkir with sets and costumes produced in the Brussels workshop of Jean Van der Borght. The ballet was revived in 1930 where it was performed at the Royal Theater in Liège and again in 1932 in Ostend. In addition to music and performance, after the First World War, Ensor focused on his writings, extending his wry and contrary perspective into language and text. Ensor had written critical reviews and reflections ever since he first published “Three Weeks at the Academy,” and at the turn of the century, he would read from his idiosyncratic texts during lively evenings and events at the Rat Mort café. After the first publication of his writings in 1921, Ensor was invited as a speaker at events, banquets, and art exhibitions, where he would often perform his texts. As his essays, for these spoken performances Ensor invented a new manner of presentation that combined Rabelaisian humor, invented wordplay and syntax, hybrid phrases, and polychromatic rhythm to present the artist’s idiosyncratic and contrary perspective on contemporary culture. As

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Richard Hobbs has noted, Ensor’s writings, as well as these lecture/performances with their anarchic disregard for the niceties of spelling and a highly suggestive polysemy, continued the ironic discourse and disruptive indignation of his earlier work even as they expanded his exploration of color and line in new ways.74 Lauded, awarded, and feted, by the very society he previously parodied and opposed with an avant-garde flourish, Ensor persisted with his speeches and writings in performing the very contrary identity that had earlier lent visibility to his oppositional perspective and unique vision. Even as his visual art practice faded, Ensor, no less diminished, discovered in music and especially in language and performance new ways to explore his ideas and concerns while staying ever so present before the public. As he had earlier in his career, Ensor remained in his later years surrounded by his circle, that very society and contemporary milieu that had once sustained his art practice and continued to inspire him.

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Ensor’s involvement with his contemporary society can be seen in both his choice of subjects and their public exhibition at salons, particularly at Les XX, where he, as this artist collective, aimed “to shock the bourgeoisie” (“épater la bourgeoisie”). Ensor’s social engagement began with depictions of bourgeois life and representations of lower-class workers and peasants that he painted and exhibited in the early 1880s. Moving away from his early Realist orientation, in the later 1880s Ensor’s work became personal and imaginative and more exaggerated and satirical as his radical subjectivity responded to current political events and social concerns. Ensor’s friendship with the Rousseau family and his contacts with progressive Liberals and anarcho-socialist theory then circulating in Brussels artistic and intellectual circles emboldened his leftist leanings and anarchist outlook. Although references to current events, individuals, and governmental policies first appeared in his work in the 1880s, it would not be until after his father’s death and his disaffection with Les XX that Ensor’s critical individualism became more evident in his work and his wildly inventive and sardonic style emerged. When Ensor’s most overtly political work appeared in the late 1880s, its anti-authoritarian perspective and scathing view of conformist Belgian society advanced the artist’s personal “propaganda by the deed,” becoming in a sense anarchist bombs designed to affront both his colleagues at Les XX and the Brussels public alike. Ensor’s social critique grew wider and more satirical in the mid-1890s, as he addressed topical social issues such as hygiene, contagion, and modern medical practice. At the end of the century, Ensor, retaining his idiosyncratic method and biting, often sarcastic, humor, focused on cultural debates and fin-de-siècle life. In these exchanges between his personal, expressive, and often visionary view and its public presentation at exhibitions, Ensor articulated the social agenda of his art practice. This chapter turns then to consider the social themes and concerns that Ensor explored as an artist and to the nexus of social and political events, debates over science and religion, explorations of the natural world, the social individual and urban life, and concerns over degeneration and disease, that inform his most characteristic works of social satire, critique, and dissent.

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Private Spaces, Public Meaning Ensor’s first exhibitions at the Paris, Ghent, and Brussels Salons and smaller exhibition venues like L’Essor, La Chrysalide and Les XX featured large-scaled paintings of domestic interiors, mostly set in the family home in Ostend. Evoking the pleasures of contemporary bourgeois life, these well-observed parlors and other indoor spaces provided a persuasive public introduction, demonstrating Ensor’s facility with paint and his modernist credentials as a socially engaged realist painter. Although Ensor’s subject was not new—by the 1880s domestic scenes were a popular choice for genre painters at annual Salons in Belgium, France, and elsewhere—his paintings offered a unique perspective. Neither sentimental nor simply an inventory of bourgeois taste, Ensor’s early realist paintings advanced a compellingly direct and decidedly positivist exploration of the values and social significance of middle-class life, one that was also informed by daily experience. By the late nineteenth century, the bourgeois home had become a place of escape and a refuge from the disorder and upheaval of a rapidly changing society in interior spaces separated into distinct spheres of gender and class where the bourgeois man could be in control, his authoritative position reinforced by laws of property and propriety. In petite bourgeois homes like Ensor’s, however, these distinctions were often blurred. Families lived near or above their businesses and workers or servants shared the same spaces. In the Ensor household, these spaces included the rooms rented to shop assistants and in the summer months to temporary workers and tourists. Even Ensor’s studio on the top or attic floor contained the unspoken narrative of class as typically these rooms were servant’s living quarters. One of the earliest of Ensor’s interiors and his first critical, artistic success, Chez Miss (At mademoiselle’s) (Plate 12), exhibited at the 1881 Brussels Salon, 1882 Paris Salon, and 1883 Ghent Salon to generally positive reviews, masterfully describes the refined affluence and calm ambiance of the bourgeois parlor as Émile Verhaeren noted in his review of the painting at the 1883 Ghent salon: Chez Miss . . . possesses all the artistic merits that we ordinarily recognize in him. Excellent daylight, intimacy, life, loose execution, indicating a confidence and a boldness of a master. The subject is quite simple: a woman plays the piano, a young man listens. And yet despite the fact that this could be just anybody, we sense our life, our existence, our daily routine filtering through. We relive one of our past hours; we recall an analogous visit somewhere in a bourgeois drawingroom, the after dinner, as the “miss” of the house sits down in front of the piano, at our request, and plays us some Mendelssohn or Shubert. And that is the rare and glorious gift of this painting, to be an evocation of such life, that from the start it allows us to enter it, so to speak, as actors in the represented scene.1

Renamed Russian Music in 1886, and on view at Les XX’s third salon that year where it was bought by the painter Anna Boch, this painting, with its subtle color harmonies rendered in a seemingly effortless, loose gestural stroke describes a

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well-observed room with thick drapes and carpets, dark mahogany piano, marble fireplace, mirror with a gilded frame, chinoiserie, and vases, mirroring no doubt the world of the predominantly middle-class crowd who would have seen the painting at these salons. Taking place in the parlor, the most public room of the bourgeois home, Chez Miss/Russian Music presents a narrative bounded by propriety. Although alone in the room, the man, modeled by the artist Willy Finch and woman, the artist’s sister Mitche, maintain the etiquette of the parlor through formal pose and proper distance. The man, wearing the dark suit and high collar of a middle-class gentleman, listens intensely, his almost expressionless profile and entitled bearing highlighted by the warm light of the window on the left side of the painting. The woman, viewed only from the back, displays her refinement and education by playing the piano. The original title, Chez Miss, feminizes the space, defining the man as a visitor, his prominent position and passive listening set against the woman’s more active yet secondary role as entertainer and hostess. With the model’s actual identities and relationship known only to the artist, the pair’s respectful distance and lack of interaction, despite the familiar setting, combines with the woman’s role as performer and the room’s tasteful trappings to offer an unexpectedly sympathetic yet objectively distanced view of the modern bourgeois life, one whose gratifications are simultaneously defined by the prescriptions of gender and middle-class decorum. Displaying both his painterly skill and engagement with a modernist subject, Ensor’s absorbing representation of the salon in Chez Miss/Russian Music invites the public to experience and identify in a direct and unsentimental way with bourgeois life and leisure. After Dinner in Ostend (later re-titled Afternoon in Ostend) (Figure 3.1), a more staged and theatrical presentation, was first exhibited at L’Essor in 1882 and then refused by the jury for the 1884 Brussels Salon. In this painting, two women seated at a table are now central to the composition and narrative. Mitche, wearing a yellow dress and a hat tied with a big yellow bow, leans forward and looks up expectantly. As the hostess, Ensor’s mother, Maria Catherina, cup and saucer in hand, sits back and looks to the side, her face in shadow. Juxtaposing the painting’s rectilinear format with the curvilinear forms of the women, chairs, and lamps, Ensor focuses attention on the table with its tea setting, square serving tray, coffee and teapot, cup, and saucer that duplicate the painting’s composition in miniature. A warm light envelops everyone and everything—the women, especially Mitche in her fashionable dress, the teacups with their chinoiserie detail, the vases, furniture, and other decorative elements rendered with a vigorous gestural brushstroke that invests the bourgeois salon with a limpid, viscous materiality. Adroitly pinioning these women within their milieu, Ensor steers the spectator’s attention toward the afternoon tea, a social ritual shared by women. Mitche’s gaze serves as an invitation for the viewer to join in, perhaps by using the extra cup and saucer on the tray. But for whom is the tea, and what is its significance? There are only two chairs at the table and the women seem to exist in separate spheres. As the hostess, Ensor’s mother leans back from the table, her pose withdrawn and diminished next to her well-dressed visitor. Indeed, even with the sociability of the occasion and the shared

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Figure 3.1  James Ensor, Afternoon in Ostend, 1881, oil on canvas, 108 × 133 cm, Antwerp, KMVSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

table, a vast distance separates these two women, their lack of interaction lending an aura of awkward artificiality. Despite a carefully rendered atmosphere that celebrates the comfort of the bourgeois salon, the disquieting tension and displaced narrative of Afternoon in Ostend invites the public to look more closely at the narratives and social rituals of middle-class life. Drawn and assuredly rendered from direct observation of the artist’s circumstance and social standing, the subject of Afternoon in Ostend was important enough for Ensor that when the painting was refused by the 1884 Belgian Salon, he sent it to Les XX the following year, proudly noting the rejection in the catalog. Oyster Eater (Plate 13), one of the most unconventional and daring of Ensor’s bourgeois interiors, explores the expressive possibilities of the material world and its appeal to the middle class. Showing off his ability to paint color and light, Ensor moves from the dark tonalities of his earlier interiors to a lighter, richer palette of reds, yellows, and oranges to represent a brightly lit dining room filled with many reflective surfaces. A young woman, again modeled by Ensor’s sister Mitche, her bodice now covered with a large bib, sits between a table and a sideboard, her head reflected in the mirror. A large dining table, covered with a white tablecloth, takes up most of the center of the large canvas. Tilted forward, the table serves as a ground for Ensor to represent a

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sumptuous display of china, glassware, bottles of wine, and a bouquet of flowers as he invites appraisal of his ability to render a diverse range of surfaces both opaque and transparent. While the observer might be distracted by Ensor’s painterly evocation of color and light, the woman’s attention remains focused on the oyster on a half shell in her hand that she holds as if to offer it to the viewer, further accenting the sensual nature of this intimate encounter. Although the table is set for two—perhaps this is a private rendezvous—with the other diner only recently departed (as a napkin on the chair in the left foreground suggests) Mitche, left alone, proceeds to enjoy her meal. Coyly placing this oyster nearly at the center of the composition, Ensor intermingles spectatorial delight in flowers, wine bottles, glasses, plates, and mirrors with erotic overtones intimating pleasure and sensuality. Like Ensor, The French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) was quite interested in the expressive potential of the domestic interior, often painting his family’s home on the Rue de Miromesnil in Paris. In a similar fashion to Ensor’s Oyster Eater, Caillebotte’s 1876 painting Luncheon (France, Private collection) amply demonstrates his skill in rendering the subtle light and atmosphere of the dining room. While the plunging perspective in Caillebotte’s painting places us at the table and supposes a shared sensibility of decorum and class, the decor, formally dressed figures, and presence of servants insist on a certain haute-bourgeois formality. As Ensor, Caillebotte uses members of his immediate family—his mother and brother, René—as models for the diners along with the family butler, Jean Daurelle. Despite these familial ties, the exaggerated length of the dining room table and orderly arrangement of crystal and tableware accentuate the remoteness of the figures. These accouterments of middle-class wealth and refinement combine with the separateness, silence, and propriety of the Caillebotte family luncheon to evoke the psychological isolation of haute-bourgeois life and allude to the class difference between the uppermiddle class and those who serve them. Ensor’s solitary diner, placed in the sensuous, material world of color and light, remains engrossed in her meal, her informal pose and the setting focusing the viewer’s attention on food and its consumption and the celebration of the indulgences of petite bourgeois experience. Drawing upon Caillebotte’s composition, Paul Signac presents his version of the middle-class interior in his The Dining Room (Opus 152) (Figure  3.2), exhibited at Les XX in 1888 as Opus 152, two years after Ensor showed The Oyster Eater. Intent on demonstrating the versatility of Neo-Impressionist technique, Signac, as had Caillebotte and Ensor, draws the viewer’s attention to how light reflects off a variety of surfaces, juxtaposing them with the stilted poses of the diners who sit at the table drinking coffee. While Signac’s figures, modeled by the artist’s grandfather and possibly his mother, along with a maid, are placed close to the viewer, their faces contain little individuality or expression. Frozen in static poses that emphasize a lack of social interaction and the composition’s underlying geometry, the diners and the domestic servant become generalized examples of social types. Although just as carefully observed, Ensor’s Oyster Eater contains neither the upper-class reserve of Caillebotte nor the meticulous appraisal of Signac, offering instead a rather startlingly complex and compelling public narrative about women’s experience and petite bourgeois life. As views into private spaces of apparent comfort

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 3.2  Paul Signac, The Dining Room (Opus 152), 1886–87, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 116.5 cm, Otterlo, Netherlands, Collection Kröller-Müller Museum (photo: © Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum)

and security and public displays of propriety and social decorum, Ensor’s paintings of women dining on oysters, having afternoon tea, and participating in domestic life form a perceptive and absorbing inquiry into the domestic interior and the discourses of class and the gender in modern experience. In these familiar if underrepresented spaces, Ensor makes visible not only the pleasures but also the anxieties, tension, boredom, and disappointment that hover just beneath the surface of home life. At the same time, Ensor’s paintings of the bourgeois salon offer a dialogue about the lifestyle and values of the entrepreneurial petite bourgeois to modern-day Belgium even as they underscore the emerging social narrative of his art practice.

Workers as Subject At the same early Les XX salons where his bourgeois salons were on view, Ensor also exhibited representations of working-class life including drawings of dockworkers, servants, and peasants and interior scenes. Modeled by local men and women from the docks and streets near his home, these large format drawings featured fishermen, laborers, and, at times, women domestics and servants, wearing loose baggy clothing, scarfs, and caps typical of their class. Ensor recruited and paid for models to stand, sit, hold brooms, and read books in the artist’s studio as they pose and act out the artist’s earnest exploration of working-class types. If his paintings of the bourgeois salon focused on domestic life and the daily experiences of women, these drawings, for the most part, explore the world outside Ensor’s home, a place occupied more often by men and well known to Ensor, his father, and his colleague Willy Finch. Man with a Cauldron (Figure 3.3) is typical of this series. A young man wearing a cap tilted rakishly on his head and holding a large bowl as a prop sits on a box dangling his leg as he looks out toward the artist/viewer. Surrounded by neither the docks nor a tavern, more typical hangouts for this lower-class man, but by paintings and drawings that locate the setting as the artist’s studio, the man looks out, his posture indicative of his unease and the labored nature of this exercise. Viewing his model from above as

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Figure 3.3  James Ensor, Man with Cauldron, c. 1880, pencil on paper, 74 × 61 cm, Gift of Moshe Lewin, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (photo: ©Tel Aviv, Museum of Fine Arts)

he does in most of these drawings, Ensor assumes the perspective of the flaneur, his fascination with and difference from his sitter articulated by the distance that separates them. Indeed, while these early drawings reflect Ensor’s general curiosity about the working classes, they lack any direct engagement or awareness of a worker’s daily life or social circumstance, especially when compared to his more intimate and personal views of bourgeois salons. While his drawings of fisherman and dock workers are more detached, other drawings provide a view closer to the artist’s own petit-bourgeois experience. Seated Young Woman (1880, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum), her elbow resting awkwardly on several journals next to an ornate table, looks out wall-eyed at the artist, her expression and pose lending the image a certain ambiguity. Her occupation might be unclear but her unadorned clothing conveys her status, clearly signaling that she is neither from the docks nor a domestic servant or housecleaner but most likely a young woman who rented one of the rooms at the Ensor home and consented to pose for the artist. The Lamplighter (Figure 3.4), one of Ensor’s first paintings of a lower-class worker, uses the same large-scale format as the drawings. The painting portrays a standing figure of a boy dressed in the typical cap, scarf, dark clothing, and wooden shoes of the working class, gazing at the navigator’s lantern that he holds in his hands. An oil lamp can be seen on the nearby small square table, but otherwise the walls are bare as Ensor again poses this child worker in his studio. Isolated from any working world context, the boy looks out of place, a model posed with a prop rather than a portrait of an actual lamplighter. The monochromatic color scheme and sparsely decorated room focus the viewer’s attention on the boy in such a straightforward manner that his young age is almost overlooked. Coming at a time child labor was just beginning to be investigated, Ensor’s representation reinforces the commonality of such labor practices. Ensor was so unfamiliar with the kind of work a lamplighter did, that when he first exhibited the painting at L’Essor in 1883, he titled the painting Stove Sitter (Une Fumiste). Despite this misrepresentation The Lamplighter, with its singular focus on a laborer, hung at the center of his installation

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 3.4  James Ensor, The Lamplighter 1880, oil on canvas, 151 × 91 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© Brussels, RMFAB, photo: J.  Geleyns—Art Photography)

­ igure 3.5  Installation view, with F Lamplighter (near center) and (second to the right) The Drunkards, Salon of Les XX, 1884, photograph, Brussels, RMFAB, ACAB Inv. 4653 (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography)

at Les XX’s first salon in 1884 (Figure 3.5), purposefully demonstrating Ensor’s Realist orientation and social engagement. Eleven years later, in 1895, the Belgian government, recognizing the importance of this subject, purchased it for the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts, making it the first painting of Ensor’s to enter a Belgian museum, several years before any of his colleagues at Les XX would be so honored. The Drunkards (Figure  3.6), exhibited at the same 1884 Les XX salon as The Lamplighter, focused attention on another burning social issue: alcoholism amid the working classes. In Belgium, low wages, long hours, and poverty made for a bleak life for the worker, that was hardly mollified by cheap beer or genever, an inexpensive

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Figure  3.6  James Ensor, The Drunkards, 1883, oil on canvas, 115 × 165 cm, Brussels, Belfius Art Collection (photo: courtesy Belfius Art Collection)

gin-based drink, served at 190,000 drinking establishments (one per thirty-one people) by the end of the 1880s. Along with syphilis and tuberculosis, alcoholism was considered a social disease allied by Dr. Bénédict-Augustin Morel and others with degeneracy and a progressive morbid pathology that, passed through heredity from generation to generation, led to criminality, perverse behavior, insanity, and more broadly to the moral decline of the nation.2 While bleak, Ensor’s representation of public drunkenness is direct and circumspect. The Drunkards takes place in a sunny saloon where two men, wearing the large wooden shoes, dark clothing, and caps that tag them as members of the working class, are seated at a table. This composition, with two seated figures one in profile and the other facing the viewer, might have had as its source, Jean-François Raffaëlli’s The Absinthe Drinkers (Les Déclassés), 1881 (Figure 3.7) that Ensor might have seen at the sixth Impressionist salon in 1881.3 But even if The Drunkards appears to mirror Raffaëlli’s painting, their approach to the subject is quite different. The two men in Ensor’s painting are unmistakably lower-class workers with poses more resigned and inebriated than Raffaëlli’s bourgeois men seated at an outdoor café. While both Ensor and Raffaëlli demonstrate their engagement with a modern subject and ability to convey Realist detail, Ensor’s painting confines the viewer within the pub’s interior in intimate proximity to these men so that they might witness close-up the hopelessness that alcoholism brings to the working class. Reinforcing his realistic approach, Ensor includes recognizable signs of both lowerclass life and the effects of alcohol. A bottle and drinking glasses, one of which has

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Figure  3.7 Jean-François Raffaëlli, The Absinthe Drinkers (Les Déclassés), 1881, oil on canvas, 108 × 108 cm, San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund, Jay D. and Clare C. McEvoy Endowment Fund, Tribute Funds, Friends of Ian White Endowment Fund, Unrestricted Art Acquisition Endowment Income Fund, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund, and the Yvonne Cappeller Trust 2010.16 (© San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Photo: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco)

fallen to the floor, suggest that the two men have been drinking genever to excess. Both appear inebriated with one, head in folded arms, collapsed onto the table in a drunken stupor while the other leans forward, his eyes looking out without focus, avoiding the viewer’s gaze. Despite their shared table, the two men hardly interact, their distressed postures and unfocused regard forming an ironic counterpoint to the room’s warm sunny atmosphere. On the wall behind them, posters announce a bankruptcy auction of household and personal property, directly connecting this scene of intoxication and alcoholism with the loss of material possessions and dignity. As he had in Afternoon in Ostende, Ensor arranges the figures around a central table, but the spare furnishings of The Drunkards could not be a starker contrast to the ambiance of the bourgeois salon.

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In other works, as Sick Tramp Trying to Warm Himself (1882, Ostende, Mu.ZEE) (destroyed in bombing raids on Ostend in the Second World War) suggests, Ensor could be quite sympathetic to the working-class struggle with poverty and alcoholism. In this painting, a tramp wearing a fisherman’s cap and scarf, loose jacket, pants, and wooden shoes, is informally posed with his feet propped up on a stove as he looks up toward the viewer, a smile evident beneath his stubbly beard. The room, devoid of furniture, except for the stove and a large cup in the foreground that establishes scale, situates the scene once again in Ensor’s studio. While representing, a familiar social type, Ensor avoids the moralizing narratives, often found in paintings by Société Libre artist Charles de Groux (1825–70). He also does not associate this figure with degeneracy or criminal behavior as had Dr. Morel or Cesar Lombroso in his book Man of Genius (London, 1891). Neither abhorrent nor patronizing, but instead this rather straightforward and somewhat sympathetic image of a local Ostend man reflected a shared sociability, as the exchange of glances between the artist and his model suggests. Disheveled as he might appear, this “sick tramp” may also represent for Ensor a certain independence, that is the perspective of the outsider unconstrained by social approval, the same sort of autonomy that the artist would associate with his father and selfrepresent in The Pisser. Given his father’s alcoholism and periods of heavy drinking, the vacant looks and inebriated poses of The Drunkards were no doubt familiar to Ensor. Made only a few years after the Ensor family’s bankruptcy and sale of family possessions and four years before his father’s death from alcohol-related causes, the posted bankruptcy notice in the background provides a veiled but poignant personal note, one that adds a certain obdurate remoteness to The Drunkards while simultaneously enhancing its air of reportorial objectivity. Even as he coolly describes working-class men in the throes of alcohol abuse and social alienation, Ensor neither ignores the growing problem of alcoholism among the poor nor dismisses such behavior as a regressive mark of heredity and degeneracy. Instead, as he had in his portrayals of middle-class salons, Ensor describes the separate spheres of class difference, spaces that, despite their palpable light and atmosphere, lack the warmth of social interaction. The Realist objectivity of these works does not hide Ensor’s own rather ironic perspective, one that is both shaped by and questioning of the values of his social class. The bourgeois interiors might affirm the importance of social position and allude to the private intimacy and security of the home, but they also obfuscate the complexities of Ensor’s own experience including an absent father, a predominantly feminine domestic space, and the family’s fluctuating social standing. At the same time, while Ensor’s depictions of the working class promoted his Realist credentials and engagement with current social issues, by relocating his representations of lower-class types from the street to the studio, Ensor self-consciously articulated his own classed petit-bourgeois perspective and the social and psychological tensions that circulate just beneath the surface of middle-class propriety. If the ambiguity of The Drunkards complicates any simple reading, Scandalized Masks (Plate 14), with its blend of realist description, satiric distortion, and implied violence, stakes out a new approach for representing social subjects. Rather than the

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family parlor or a sunny tavern, the artist’s studio, now transformed into a generic interior lit by a single hanging oil lantern with a table at the center, serves as the setting for a dramatic encounter between two figures. Dressed in plain, rather nondescript clothing that denotes their lower class status, the man and woman appear to be wearing masks, although the standing figure could also be an old woman with a large nose and chin, dark glasses, and wearing a mob cap. She holds an object that resembles a club but is instead a musical instrument, perhaps a horn or wooden flute like those Ensor had been known to play. Although the nature of the relationship between the two is unclear, their meeting is clearly confrontational, with the masking, props, and lighting only elevating the theatricality of the scene. In Scandalized Masks, Ensor moves away from description and anecdote to instead focus attention on the more psychological aspects of the interior. Intent perhaps on shocking or “scandalizing” middle-class propriety, Ensor presents a drama frozen at a moment potent with interpretive possibilities: travesty, social alienation, alcoholism, and violence, all staged for maximum pictorial effect. Intensifying the cast shadows and obscuring any personal association with the artist’s parents or grandmother, Ensor presents a farcical encounter between two masked figures. The disruptive addition of carnivalesque masquerade invests the scene with a theatrical strangeness that undermines any semblance of everyday normalcy to accentuate instead the painting’s satirical thrust. At the same time, the slippage between observation and fantastic invention first seen in Scandalized Masks suggests a new manner of working, one that Ensor introduced to the Belgian public by exhibiting this painting alongside The Drunkards at Les XX’s 1884 salon. Based on observation but staged in the studio and employing performance and theatrical display, masking and satirical inversion, Scandalized Masks makes visible a manner of working and strategy of critique that, while giving more prominence to Ensor’s subjectivity and contrary individualism, confronts the public with a paradoxical reenactment of the social dynamic of modern Belgian life.

Into the Theater of Artifice Scandalized Masks also reflects Ensor’s engagement with the compelling and disruptive discourses of contemporary theater, popular culture, and zwanze humor. From the beginning of his career, Ensor had copied illustrations from journals and made sketches of performers including dancers, clowns, and costumed figures, at times from live performances he attended. Ensor was also a frequent visitor to Brussels’s numerous cafe-cabarets, puppet theaters, topical revues, and most likely attended burlesque parodies written by Théo Hannon and other colleagues. By the mid-1880s box-like compositions resembling proscenium stages began appearing in Ensor’s work along with costumes, props, masks, commedia dell’arte characters, puppets, and mannequin-like figures. Using these elements, Ensor shifts from realist descriptions of everyday life to artificial arrangements that join posing and performance with fantasy and invention to create expressive, staged re-enactments of modern experience.

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Astonishment of the Mask Wouse (Plate 15) begun in 1887 and completed in 1889, continues Ensor’s exploration of the studio as a theatrical arena. Once again, the setting, a plain and sparsely decorated room with tilted floorboards, calls to mind a stage with figures entering from either side. Among the masks, musical instruments, objects and clothing piled on the floor at the center-right, are references to Ensor’s other paintings including the head of the woman from Scandalized Masks recognizable by her mobcap, dark blue glasses, and flute and another masked head with a top hat that resembles the seated man from that same painting. Skulls and another mask, clothing and boots, a violin, fan, child’s doll, wine bottle, and, in the foreground, a skeleton holding a burning candle, complete what looks like a collection of stage props left after a performance. A woman carrying an umbrella, her head covered with a bonnet, and wearing gloves, skirt, and shawl, accessories that indicate her status as a fashionable middle-class matron, enters as if on cue to face this pile of props. With her tiny hands, mask-like face, and somewhat transparent costume, the woman resembles a puppet more than a real person. Defying description and even corporeality, this strange figure reaffirms, as do the masks, costumes, and skulls piled up on the floor, that we are witnessing a scene of pure invention that combines theatrical artifice with carnival travesty. The painting’s stage setting and reference to “wouse” could be a allusion to Mrs. Tow-Wouse in Henry Fielding’s satirical novel, Joseph Andrews, published in 1742. While Ensor’s “wouse” more closely resembles one of the masks in the pile on the right or the figures in the earlier Scandalized Masks than Fielding’s character, the Astonishment of the Mask Wouse with its theatrical context and use of masking is nonetheless suffused with the same combination of absurd farce and moral critique used by Fielding and his contemporary, William Hogarth, an artist Ensor also copied. As these eighteenth-century English satirists, Ensor invites his audience to watch this ironic parody of middle-class propriety unfold on the painted stage like the burlesque satires and contemporary comedy of manners he had seen in Brussels. The same year that Ensor painted Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, the studio serves as the setting for another drama, this time performed by skeletons. With its stage scrim and green backdrop similar to the hanging orientalist screen seen in the background of Mask Wouse, Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves (Plate 16) once again presents a lively scene with figures entering as if coming onto a stage from the wings. The composition, like the earlier Sick Tramp Warming Himself, now centers around a stove where two composite figures with skull heads stand while other skulls and props lie scattered across the floor. With their loose clothing and barely articulated bodies, these skull-headed figures, as Mask Wouse, resemble puppets or dolls and are surrounded by accessories that allude to social status, creativity, and the arts. At the center, a pair of skeletons resembling a petit-bourgeois couple—“he” in a top hat and “she” wrapped in a shawl—stand by a pot-bellied stove. Between them, a lantern and a brush rest on the stove and nearby, a violin, brushes, and a palette. Skulls, musical instruments, a palette, and references to light and fire establish this scene as a vanitas contemplation on the transience of life, one that Ensor has playfully transformed in Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves into a modern-day “Dance of

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Death” with skeleton-puppets ruefully commenting on the challenges of the artistic life. The palette and violin refer to the creative invention that occurs within the confines of the studio where subjective imagining supplants reality and all that remains is the performance of the artist’s imagination. With only their attributes and bourgeois costumes to bolster them, the three central skeletal figures in Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves dramatize the artist’s life as a search for sustenance, warmth, and possibly the light of inspiration. The words on the stove base—“The fire is out. Will you find any tomorrow?”—aptly comment on the painting’s ironic ruse even as the rich, warm palette and the stove’s orange glow disallow the cold, desperate situation that these words suggest. Undercutting the romantic pretense of the title, the text sets up a playful incongruity that, like the skeleton/figures and references to painting and music, reminds the viewer that they are attending a performance—a travesty or pleasant diversion—where costumes, props, and sensuous jewel-like color combine with the absurd premise of skeletons searching for warmth to present Ensor’s reflection on artistic creation and bourgeois life. By the late 1880s, masks become more prevalent in Ensor’s work. Part of the social fabric of nineteenth-century Belgian life, and commonly worn during carnival festivities, masks were associated with performance and satire and often found in theater performances and burlesque revues. Masks were also used in satirical caricature of both conservative and liberal persuasion to comment on social pretension and political duplicity. The mask offered a disruptive counter-discourse, undermining, for example, the prescriptive agenda of phrenology, which used the descriptive details of appearance as a way to predict temperament, illness, and even moral decay. Indeed, with its potential for concealment and deception and its ties to popular culture, theater, and satire, the mask provided Ensor with the perfect vehicle for making visible his critical commentary and expressive intent. The proscenium-like space and theatrical lighting of Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves and Astonishment of the Mask Wouse also call to mind the staging of current events or actualités in contemporary wax museums and dioramas. These historical tableaus and recreations (at times with living models) could be found at inexpensive commercial venues such as the Musée Grévin in Paris, and the Musée Bonnefois at the Foire du Midi in Brussels, at Universal Exhibitions, and increasingly at museums like the Museum of Natural Sciences. Naturalizing and democratizing modern experience, these mesmerizing and at times grotesque installations with their realistic wax figures and displays played to prurient voyeurism and a modern thirst for celebrity, transforming “real-life” current events into spectacle and history into an easily digestible commodity. Many of the composite figures that populate the theater-like stages of Ensor’s paintings resemble puppets, an association with puppet theater that becomes more explicit in Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man (Figure  3.8). In this painting, the central figure holding a sign that reads “civet” (stew) retains its puppet’s rod and characteristic big head and loose costume, while another costumed figure with its rod still attached, lies collapsed in the foreground. The narrative, as in Ensor’s other paintings discussed above, unfolds on a raked stage, where masked and

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Figure 3.8  James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man, 1891, oil on canvas, 59 × 74 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

costumed figures watch from doorways on either side of what looks like a backdrop or scrim. At the center, two figures spar over the hanged man, their bodies fashioned from an assemblage of accessories including hats, jackets, skirts, and boots, Topped with skeleton heads, these composite figures perform with frozen poses the kind of stylized violence commonly found in Punch and Judy puppet shows of this period. Puppet plays appealed to Ensor in many ways. Presented on improvised stages in poor neighborhoods, puppets used puns and disruptive narratives delivered in dialect and slang to mock the pretension of the middle class, enunciating through the puppet’s body and words the hearty and subversive voice of the working class and the irreverent parodic narratives of Belgium’s rich zwanzist tradition. Similarly, the cabaret puppet shows like those Ensor may have seen at the Chat Noir in Paris sought to undermine propriety and social order by combining wordplay and base, often scatological humor with ribald social and political satire. No doubt the way that rod puppets moved also appealed to Ensor as their awkward, crude, and bumbling gestures reflected the expressive possibilities of manipulation by the hand of the puppet master—or the artist. Like Ensor, the Symbolist playwrights Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) and Charles van Lerberghe (1861–1907) were also drawn to the puppet play’s evocative potential. Seeking a new way to present their ideas, Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe instructed

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the actors in their plays to perform as if marionettes and use stiff poses, essential, hieratic gestures, and mime with their lines voiced off stage so that these “impersonal puppets, beings of wood and cardboard, possess a pure and mysterious life. Their aspect of truth catches us unawares, disquiets. Their elemental gestures contain the complete expression of human feelings.”4 For Edmond Picard, the monodrama, words, evocative gestures, and the imagination could more directly evoke the expressive and symbolic within everyday experience. His play demonstrating the monodrama, The Juror (Le Juré), with a frontispiece and drawings by Odilon Redon was staged at Les XX in 1887, a performance that Ensor likely saw. Like the puppet, for many writers and artists, the Pierrot performing in white face using stilted and static expressive gestures similarly promoted symbolic form over narrative. In the early 1880s, a radically new interpretation emerged, one that transformed Pierrot into a tragic and neurotic symbol of the modern age or a trickster bent on deceiving the public. Embraced by Belgian and French playwrights, the masked countenance and costume of this often macabre, decadent, and at times, bittersweet Pierrot could both mock modern social attitudes and embody fin de siècle pessimism. Brussels played an important role in presenting these new Symbolist plays, monodramas and pantomime productions including performances by Paul Margueritte’s troupe in 1883, Maeterlinck and van Lerberghe’s first “plays for puppets” in 1889, and Pierrot plays written by Belgian writers including Théo Hannon. One of the more famous of these, Paul Margueritte’s Pierrot Assassin of His Wife was performed at André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in 1888 around the same time that the Pierrot figure first appeared in Ensor’s work, most notably as a disguised self-portrait in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 on the left-hand side, in profile, wearing a yellow costume and tall red hat Pierrots, puppet-like figures, masks, and skeletons become then props in what becomes Ensor’s “theater of artifice” with his studio serving as a transformative space for staging his particular view of modern life. Embracing the compelling and dynamic discourses of popular culture and zwanze parody and joining observation with fantasy and invention, Ensor combines assemblage, wordplay, mordant humor, and grotesque or absurd exaggeration to create improbable juxtapositions. As his social and political engagement intensified, this turn toward travesty becomes a way for Ensor to perform his discursive critical self as both a personal, expressive comment and a critique of contemporary Belgium.

Light as Social Allegory Ensor’s keenly observed paintings and drawings of his contemporary milieu proposed one way to make visible his artistic and social perspective, his painted theaters of artifice, invention and performance, afforded another, and religious allegory offered yet one more alternative path. At the Academy and in the years that followed, Ensor made numerous paintings and drawings of religious subjects. One of the largest, a drawing with the ornate title Monks in a State of Ecstasy Claim the Body of the

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Figure 3.9  James Ensor, Mystic Death of the Theologian, 1880, 1885–86, Pencil, charcoal, and black crayon on paper, mounted on canvas, 97 × 83 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Divine Sus Ovis, Despite Opposition of Bishop Friton, later retitled Mystic Death of the Theologian (Figure 3.9), demonstrates in both size and complexity Ensor’s familiarity with the conventions of academic drawing. Enlarging the original drawing by more than a third and changing its original exterior view into a vast cathedral interior, Ensor joins together multiple scenes to create a dramatic theatrical setting for his religious allegory. Derived neither from the Bible nor another religious text, Mystic Death of a Theologian presents Ensor’s invented narrative as a highly emotional, even feverishly devout scene unfolding within a strange, mystical setting. Carrying banners and watched by onlookers in the balcony above, a prayerful group of monks, women, and children emerge out of the shadows, and into the light, guided by a man, possibly Peter the Hermit who led the First Crusade to the Holy Land, raising his arms in an ecstatic response. Drawn in a lighter, more decorative line, another group of worshipers, led by the elaborately dressed Bishop “Friton”, enters the scene from the opposite direction, his presence nearly overlooked within the vast cathedral interior. St. Francis hovers like an apparition nearby and the Virgin Mary standing in a niche, her heart bleeding,

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folds her hands in prayer. Even Christ seems to strain on the cross. The procession led by the saint moves from right to left toward a large crucifix where the “Divine Sus Ovis” of the title lies below on a bed. Apparently overwhelmed by emotion and all this adulation, the theologian reaches up, his hands in prayer, even as rays of light shine out from his bed. In some areas, Ensor combines details from observation such as the Crucifix and the statues of the Virgin and St. Francis with figures copied from Rembrandt, like the three choir boys in the right foreground. In other areas, careful observation gives way to pure invention and fantastic imagery drawn from the artist’s imagination. Unlike traditional academic allegory, the figures and references in Mystic Death of a Theologian are ambiguous and the narrative lacks any clear moral anecdote. The Academy may have taught Ensor how to recreate historical, literary, and religious events by combining erudite quotation with pictorial innovation, but in this drawing and other religious subjects done at this time, Ensor mischievously flouts convention, turning instead to invention, exotic images, and parody to promote his artistic vision. Coupled with arcane references and imaginary narratives and the use of collage and mixed media, Ensor’s generative process of imaginative inventiveness and juxtaposition would soon become an invaluable part of his art practice, especially in his more provocative satirical works of the late 1880s. While the subject of Mystic Death of the Theologian might be obscure, Ensor’s quixotic rendition of light and atmosphere is not. Indeed, light—flickering, shimmering, forming into subtle diaphanous shafts or melting into a dramatic smokey chiaroscuro—knits the scene into an evocative visual whole imbuing this religious narrative with both tangible materiality and mysterious ambiance. When combined with the drawing’s large-scale format, the light makes the event seem imminent and contemporary, it’s subject relevant to modern life and current debates over science and religion, spirituality and modern experience. As he explores the expressive potential of religious allegory in Mystic Death of the Theologian, Ensor leaves no doubt as to his ability to invent, master academic quotation, and skillfully organize a complex composition. The meandering mythic narrative does not seek resolution but rather seems to dwell in the ecstatic spectacle of its representation, like the epic operas of Wagner. The drawing’s traditional, longwinded title serves as a ruse, a way to deflate the inflated conceit of academic rules that decreed religious allegories be based on an explicit quotation or reference and follow certain well-defined conventions. Reinventing these pictorial narratives by joining them with his subjective musings and made-up fantasies, Ensor revisits the same rhetorical mark of difference and dissent he had used in his satirical “Three Weeks at the Academy”. Like that essay, in Mystic Death of the Theologian, Ensor’s vision serves as both the generative idea and the text to present a narrative that gives preference to the spiritualism of the common man over the pretentious trappings of established religion. Interestingly, this drawing that so earnestly announced Ensor’s critique of academic training while proclaiming so directly the subjective and expressive potential of religious allegory remained for many years in the collection of Jean Francois Portaels, one of Ensor’s teachers and Director of the Brussels Academy.

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As de Maeyer has shown, beginning in 1885 or 1886, Ensor returns to some of his early academic religious themed works, adding, for example, color gouache to the black and white Christ and the Cripple (1880, 1885–86, Ghent, MSK). Completely at the service of his imagination, these drawings, with their irreverent and contradictory arabesques (what de Mayer calls the “second state”) undermine and critique each drawing’s more descriptive or allegorical “first state,” to form through this process of additions and shifts, a satirical comment on each work’s earlier state and the official discourse they represent.5 As is so evident in Mystic Death of a Theologian, Ensor’s interest in light, begun as studies describing the experience of atmospheric effects, would soon lead, as it would for contemporary scientists studying perception and vision, to an exploration of emotive and evocative psychological states of being and to the association of light with both the natural, physical world and the inner world of subjectivity. As Jonathan Crary has shown, philosophical inquiry in early nineteenth century into the relationship between the exterior world and subjective experience intersected with scientific research on the retina and optic nerves, encouraging a more physiological understanding of vision and an increased emphasis on temporality and subjectivity.6 Linking observation to the body in the flux of modern experience, both Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer proposed that individual perception be both autonomous and personal. Their investigations paralleled research by scientists Johannes Muller, Hermann von Helmholtz, David Brewster, and Joseph Plateau exploring the rupture between perception and cognition in relation to time, speed, and motion. As subjectivity experienced in and over time became synonymous with the act of seeing and the body and eye became sites of power, truth, and process, artists, shifting their emphasis to the experiential and temporal, increasingly made visible the simultaneity of both their optic and personal reality by manipulating pictorial elements such as perspective, spatial discontinuity, flatness, and modeled depth. For Ensor, light meant modernity in all its aspects. In an early essay, he described vision in an evolutionary way, beginning as vulgar and crude observation described by line and then transformed through color to reveal a subtle complexity, becoming light, the tangible embodiment of modern experience.7 Light was so important to Ensor’s art practice that later in his life he chooses for his motto the expression: Pro Luce Nobilis Sum (“For Noble Light I Am”). Demolder also emphasized the importance of light for Ensor, writing in his 1892 monograph that light was a language that allowed the artist’s work to be both visible and visionary in terms that call to mind Schopenhauer and current scientific theories on perception: It is this light that lends significance and life to things. The mute neighbors of our life, do not have an interior soul (feeling?), but the sun produces in them an exterior feeling (soul), the rays awaken them from their inertia, from their rigid sleep, and they speak.8

­ s he explored these ideas in his early marines and cityscapes, Ensor realized the A potential of light for embodying not just observation and experience but also feeling and

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emotion. Perhaps this dual aspect of light was what drew him to the work of Rembrandt, whom he discovered on a trip to Holland in October 1883 with Guillaume Vogels and Louis Bellis and whose prints provided both imagery and inspiration for several drawings, paintings, and prints when he returned to Belgium. Ensor was inspired as well by the work of the British artist, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), whose paintings with their conflation of perceptual autonomy, intense opticality, and ungrounded vision he may have seen on a trip to London in 1886 (or 1887). Ensor soon began reworking some paintings and drawings from the early 1880s, adding details including dramatic atmospheric effects and imagined figures to accent this more personal and interpretive view of external reality. Drawing gained more importance in his practice, serving as an experimental arena where Ensor could join together the perceptual, evocative, and symbolic potential of light. Continuing this exploration of light as objective and subjective observation in a group of six large-scaled drawings collectively entitled Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light, Ensor acknowledged his interest in the expressive and narrative potential of religious allegory and his own growing political and social engagement while also connecting his personal vision with current debates over the role of religion in modern Belgian life.

The Politic of Religious Allegory Religion was central to nineteenth-century political discourse, with artists, often using religious allegory to comment on the ideological struggle between secular and progressive principles and conservative Catholic and ultramontane beliefs.9 When Ensor began his artistic career, the Catholic Party controlled the Belgian government and would maintain its power during the last twenty years of the century when Ensor made his most political and socially critical work. As discussed in the last chapter, Ensor’s contacts and exchanges with the progressive intellectual and artistic community in Brussels and the radical polemics of L’Art moderne had raised his awareness of the central role of religion in Belgian daily life. At the same time, Ensor’s academic training had taught him the ways in which religious allegory could be used to convey contemporary issues and values, especially when exhibited at Les XX, whose salons were associated with progressive and anarcho-socialist viewpoints. Collectively, Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light represent the public life of Jesus and its relevancy to modern Belgium, beginning with his first appearance as an infant before the shepherds, followed by his very public entry into Jerusalem, and subsequent humiliation, crucifixion, and final triumphal resurrection. Even if most of the drawings are set in the Roman Empire, distancing the spectator from present-day experience, references to his contemporary world are evident throughout and most particularly in the first drawing that he made and the largest of the series: The Lively and the Radiant: The Entry into Jerusalem (hereafter: The Entry into Jerusalem) (Plate 17). Drawn while Ensor was revising and making additions to Mystic Death of the Theologian, The Entry into Jerusalem envisions this biblical story as a modern event taking place in a teeming commercial and urban metropolis with Christ arriving during a large worker’s demonstration.

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Figure 3.10  James Ensor, Study for Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, 1885, graphite and conté crayon, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum (photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum)

As the preliminary sketch for Entry into Jerusalem (Figure 3.10) makes clear, Ensor always intended that the public associate this drawing with current events. In a letter to Mariette Hannon-Rousseau, Ensor describes the drawing’s topicality and his own sardonic purpose: The tall man mounted on a donkey with light feet, fed in the flower-filled valleys of Picardy, descends the steep slope of the rue Iscariote. Before him walk his faithful admirers. He is followed by many demonstrators carrying their banners and belonging to various revolutionary sects: vingtists, Belgian impressionists, bewitched Wagnerians, decadents, verbolâtres, deliquescents, Blonds-Belgique, etc.10 All people with a bad and suspicious smell doing Jesus the greatest harm and indulging shamelessly in disorders [in the letter Ensor crossed out “manifestations” and replaced it with the word “disorder”] likely to upset the balance of things. By a strange coincidence a military band, going to a procession, unconsciously takes the head of the procession and seems to give the demonstration an official character. This greatly scandalizes the Pharisees, Sadducees and other important people of the city (notes on the life of Caipha).11

As this passage and even a casual glimpse of the drawing makes clear, this entry takes place not in Jerusalem of the title but in the capital city of Brussels. The boulevard depicted here bears a striking resemblance to the intersection of the Boulevard Anspach and Adolph Max near the Stock Exchange near where Ensor resided at 1 rue Borgval from December 1885 until February 1886. At first glance, The Entry into Jerusalem seems to update the traditional joyous entry of a head of state, like the occasion twenty years earlier in 1865 when the

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newly crowned Belgian king Leopold II entered Brussels. But in Ensor’s drawing, it is Christ and not the king who can be seen arriving amid a vast procession that fills a broad boulevard and stretches back as far as the eye can see. Scale and detail diminish the distance between marching crowd and spectator as The Entry into Jerusalem links the enthralling spectacle of the city with the oppressive proximity of the masses and the social anxiety associated at this time with large demonstrations and mob rule. Signs, banners, and flags, evoking the discordant, contrary discourse of the street, compete for the crowd and the viewer’s attention. Banners hail Jesus as King of the Jews (“Salut Jesus Roi des Juifs”), proclaim “Long Live the Social One” (“Vive La Sociale”) and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” (“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”)—slogans popular with French revolutionaries and Freemasons; others refer to the contemporary Brussels art world of Les XX and The Impressionists, as well as the emerging Flemish Movement (“Le Mouvement Flamand”) that advocated for the political and linguistic rights of Belgium’s Flemish-speaking majority. Other signs tie the city boulevard to commerce: “Hip Hip Hoorah” and “Colman’s Mustard.” The sarcastic sign “Pork Butchers of Jerusalem” (“Charcutiers de Jerusalem”) topped with a pig’s head refers to anti-Semitic views commonly held in progressive circles. Popular anticlerical and socialist slogans including “Down with the Clergy” (“A bas la Calotte”) and “It will go (or work)” (“Ca Ira”) are also scattered about. Some placards mix biblical locations like Samaria and Nazareth with contemporary references such as Piccadilly, “Falleur,” and “Forward” (“Vooruit”)—the name of the Ghent workers co-operative founded in 1880 by Edward Anseele.12 In the middle ground near Christ, who is almost overlooked by the processing crowd, a large standard bearing the words “Smashing Wagner Phalanx or Army” (“Phalange Wagner fracassant”) appears near a military band, while in the foreground marchers press forward wearing hats with signs that proclaim “Anseele” and “Jesus,” linking the Flemish social activist with the Christ. Leading this parading multitude is none other than the French positivist theoretician Émile Littré, whose oversized portrait head Ensor had copied and collaged onto his drawing.13 Assigned the role of the drum major and wearing a hat inscribed with the words “Vive Jesus,” Littré guides the marching crowd past the reviewing stand on the lower right. Littré’s gaze looking outward toward the viewer and his prominent position coalesce with Ensor’s reimagining of the biblical story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem/Brussels as a modern demonstration parading down the city’s broad boulevards, entangling the viewing public in current debates over religion and politics. In 1884, a large pro-government march organized by the Catholic Party took place on the Boulevard Anspach. Two years later, on August 15, 1886, an even larger demonstration of more than 13,000 marchers organized by the newly formed Belgian Worker’s Party paraded in support of worker’s rights (Figure 3.11). By agreeing to have the demonstration coincide with a national holiday, the municipality and the Socialists promoted collaboration and official sponsorship, guaranteeing both a large crowd and certain respectability for the workers and their calls for universal suffrage and amnesty. By staging this demonstration in Brussels, the economic and political center of Belgium, the BWP underscored the growing importance of cities in Belgian Socialist ideology.

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Figure 3.11  “La Manifestation Socialiste le 15 Août Passant Devant les Ministères (Socialist Manifestation of August 15 (1886) Passing by the Ministries)” Le Patriote Illustré, August 22, 1886, 341, illustration, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience B 70783 (in public domain© Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, photo: courtesy Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, Antwerp)

Even if this drawing was finished before the Worker’s Party march, its depiction was no doubt inspired by events of these fraught times. Moving from biblical times to the present and from the drawn space with its references to the contemporary world that move toward rather than away from the viewer/reader, the signs and crowded procession gradually envelop the viewing audience, challenging them not only to witness and experience the politic of everyday life with all its competing interests, agendas, slogans and loyalties but also to imagine the Biblical Christ arriving in a modern Brussels amid marching workers and Flemish socialists. Immersing the beholder in current debates on the role of religion, Christ, and social activism, Ensor dramatically confronts the Belgian public who saw The Entry into Jerusalem at Les XX in 1887 with the social context of Christ’s entry and the relevance of his life to modern Belgium. The question of Christ’s divinity and social mission had been hotly debated throughout the nineteenth century by theologians and politicians alike. Applying scientific analysis to biblical texts, David Friedrich Strauss’s 1835 book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (translated in 1838 and 1856 into French by Littré) claimed that Jesus’s importance lay not in his divinity but his message of collective action. The French historian Ernest Renan published his own life of Jesus in 1863 and likewise emphasized the historical Christ.14 Both Strauss and Renan condemned orthodox theological interpretations advanced by the Catholics arguing instead that Christ’s life should be examined and understood for its contemporary relevance. In his writings, Littré interpreted the narrative of Christ’s life as one not of miracles and spiritualism but moral leadership, progressive values, and social mission.15 Renan, in particular, presented in his reading of the gospels a new, more modern Jesus, who, as a rebel and solitary man, was both independent from and resistant to power. While these positivist scholars emphasized Christ’s humanity and contribution to society, the BWP preferred

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to portray Christ as a model social individual whose motive was neither profit nor property but the common good. Indeed, in recognition of Christ’s importance to Socialism, when the BWP inaugurated their People’s House (Maison du Peuple) in Brussels in 1899, they hung Antoine Wiertz’s painting of Christ preaching, The Just (Le Juste), in the reception room. Ensor’s decision then, in 1885, the year after the Catholic Party came to power, to produce a series of drawings based on the life of Christ was both deliberate and provocative, a bid no doubt to be recognized as a modern, socially engaged artist. While The Entry into Jerusalem sets this biblical narrative in modern Brussels, other drawings in the series return to Roman times while continuing to highlight Christ’s human nature. Although The Gay: The Adoration of the Shepherds (1886, Brussels, RMFAB) takes place in a traditional manger, it is filled with bawdry imagery, some borrowed directly from Rembrandt like the dog scratching at fleas, that, along with grinning pigs, a man milking a cow, and the figure in the foreground cutting off a duck’s head, accentuates Christ’s humble circumstance and, as the bright nimbus of light surrounding Christ’s head implies, his dual nature as both a human and spiritual being. With its period costumes, tall classical columns, and flowing drapery, The Rising: Christ Shown to the People (1885, Ghent, MSK) is also set in the Roman past and, like The Entry into Jerusalem, also contains contemporary references, including portraits of Octave Maus and Willy Finch along with several self-portraits. Blending recognizable faces and details with emphatic light and dark contrasts and a setting drawn from Rembrandt’s 1636 etching Christ before Pilate (Bartsch 77), Ensor invents a realistic scene of public life set within an atmospheric space so palatable that the scene depicted seems to be occurring in the present-day. Ensor’s inclusion of nimbuses once again joins the objective and subjective aspects of vision with Christ’s dual nature and humanity as discussed by Renan and Strauss. In The Sad and Broken: Satan and his fantastic Legions Torment the Crucified One (1886, Brussels, RMFAB), Ensor focuses attention on Christ’s gruesome and painful death. Graphic details such as a skeleton tearing at Christ’s sagging body and a demon defecating onto an open wound in his hand once again reinforce the physical nature of this religious figure’s suffering, while also linking Ensor’s depiction with contemporary discussions of contagion and disease. Inspired by Rembrandt’s 1653 etching of The Three Crosses (Bartsch 78), Ensor’s version enhances the fantastic, even hallucinatory aspects of the biblical narrative, creating a vision of death that, while underscoring Christ’s human nature, plays to a public imagination weaned on spectacle. Once again, Ensor enunciates his self-identification with Christ (as seen that same year in Calvary and soon in his painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels) now by overlaying his face with that of the crucified Christ. While these drawings present a provocative mix of past and present, realistic description and atmospheric light, the last two drawings in the series return to a more traditional representation to underscore the redemptive relevancy of Christ’s life and death. Even if some of the gestures and expressions in The Tranquil and Serene: The Descent from the Cross (1886, Hasselt, Engelen collection) appear to be drawn from direct observation, and at least one of the figures looks like they could be one of

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Ensor’s contemporaries, the costumes, setting, and pose return the scene to Roman times while also admitting to the emotional toll of Christ’s public execution. Ensor’s portrayal of the resurrection, The Intense: Christ rises to the Sky (1885, Ostend, Private collection), sets Christ’s rising body against a bright background light. While this drawing provided Ensor with the opportunity to invent a scene filled with action and foreshortened poses as Christ explodes from his tomb and rises upward, he represents a miraculous spectacle, one quite possibly inspired by contemporary imaginings of the fantastic as presented in magic lantern light shows, Jules Verne’s novels, and Gustave Doré’s engaging illustrations. Pointedly affiliating Christ’s life with positivist and socialist discourse, Ensor’s series Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light emphasizes Christ’s human nature and the contemporary relevance of his mission—especially in The Entry into Jerusalem where he is arriving in Brussels amid a worker’s demonstration led by Littré. Exhibited in that same city at the 1887 Les XX salon, the capital of Belgium’s ruling Catholic Party, Ensor presents in a very provocative and public fashion his view of the ongoing public debate on religion and Christian beliefs. The radicalness of Ensor’s imagery did not go unnoticed even if many critics reviewing the Les XX salon that year could only see these drawings and Ensor’s overt allusions to Littré, socialist causes, and mass public demonstrations as another example of Les XX’s intransigence. Some reviewers recognized Ensor’s allusion to the present day with one critic even acknowledging the inflammatory nature of Ensor’s subject, labeling this series of drawings a “neo-christian, september seventh vision,” mistakenly seeing the drawings as a reference to the pro-Catholic demonstration held in Brussels in September 1884.16 As one critic put it: “Our Vingtist [Ensor] is a wily fox (roublard) looking to shock the bourgeois (épater la bourgeoisie),”17 while another dismissed these drawings as the work of an unstable degenerate: “Lubrications of a sick mind and pretentious products of a man who wishes to cause a scandal.”18 While acknowledging Ensor’s modern-day references, especially in The Entry into Jerusalem, many reviewers, rather than admit any association with contemporary events, preferred to connect the series to the rich Northern tradition of satire found in the work of artists like Rembrandt and Pieter Brueghel or dismiss the drawings outright as unfinished doodles or caricature. For Emile Verhaeren, however, the artist’s personal yet subversive and visionary approach was both stimulating and praiseworthy: This year he has gone to the dogs with mad pencil-sketches, making one think of Rembrandt gone Haywire, which one dismisses because they don’t amount to much or are bad. They seemed to have been made while hallucinating. They are stupefying at first and then impressive. They carry one towards dizziness, towards chaos, but grandiosely in a superb flight.19

As Verhaeren notes, even if these drawings are subjective hallucinations, they join with naturalistic light and atmospheric effects to evoke a “superb flight” for the viewer. In this series, Ensor’s distinctly personal and original interpretation of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection brings together the materiality and sensation of modern experience, coupling the observation of light with intense, evocative states of being

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as gay, lively and radiant, cruel, sad and broken, tranquil and serene. As the title and imagery of Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light make clear, light serves as a metaphor for Christ’s spiritual and social mission as well as the embodiment of Ensor’s personal and subjective sensation. As such, light performs multiple expressive roles—representational and symbolic, interpretive and observational, individual and collective. Even if some critics found Ensor’s exploration of light as a vehicle of sensation and feeling to be genuine, even risky, they were suspicious of Ensor’s chosen method, one that emphasized expressive mark-making and sensual luminosity over realist description. Certainly, the painting Christ Walking on the Water (1885, Essen, Folkwang Museum) on view at the same 1887 salon, confirmed their doubts for here a barely described figure of Christ hovers above the artist’s vigorous palette knife rendition of a marshy landscape while the glistening colorful light of a passing rainbow lends a palpable materiality to this miraculous narrative. For Ensor this technique of joining subjective and objective vision through color and light proved revelatory, suggesting a manner of working that could unify his ongoing exploration of the contemporary milieu and emerging self-association with Christ with the material substance of his art practice. No wonder then that by the time Ensor exhibited Christ Walking on the Water alongside Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light at Les XX, light had become a central part of his art practice, investing his subjectivity with both spiritual and social agency. Ensor’s exhibition at the 1887 Les XX salon marked his first public presentation of religious allegory, but it would not be his last. He sent or planned to show religious-themed subjects at every subsequent Les XX salon, demonstrating his artistic range while simultaneously putting forward his very personal, and to some, idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. As his identification with Christ increased, especially in the late 1880s, Ensor made many paintings, drawings, and prints that depicted Christ’s life, ministry, and social mission. Unlike the drawings The Entry into Jerusalem and Christ Shown to the People, overt references to the contemporary world are not always as evident in these works as Ensor emphasizes Christ’s role as mediator or redeemer. Ensor’s religious subjects drawn from the life of Christ accent storylines that explore the relationship between Church and State, the struggle between the material and physical world, and the redemptive social purpose of Christ’s mission. Drawings like The Merchants Chased from the Temple (1886, Belgium, Private collection) and Christ in Hell (1886, Brussels, RMFAB), for example, portray a solicitous and engaged Christ confronting worldly materialism or grotesque devils. In Christ in Hell, Christ descends after his death into a profane, abject world, one filled with genitalia, rather obscene details, and grotesque exaggerations, yet so familiar that one devil appears to welcome Christ, slapping him on the back as he greets the king devil on the throne. One of the devils holds a staff with a limp phallus, while a lobster-like figure pokes another’s tail, imbuing the scene with irreverent sexual innuendo. Christ alone retains his human form, and thus his humanity, as he stands shining brightly in his spiritual aura. This contrast of human and grotesque form only reinforces further the redemptive narrative of this story of Christ going to hell to reclaim Adam’s soul. Employing accessible and

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at times absurd tropes like exaggerated bodies and oversized heads, arabesque lines, and scatological references, Ensor underscores the burlesque and resolutely human aspects of Christ’s life. In this allegorical juncture between the biblical narrative and Ensor’s imagining, Christ is portrayed as taking a position against hypocrisy and the corrupting influence of money or confronting evil through a fantastic voyage to hell with demons, once again making the actions and activities of this religious figure relevant to the contemporary present. Similarly, the New Testament narrative of his etching Caesar’s Disclaimer (T.62) might seem at first an odd choice of subject. Based on Matthew (22: 15–22) and indebted to a painting of the same subject by Louis Gallait, who had died the previous year, the etching describes the moment when Christ is asked about taxation, a contentious and certainly political issue not just in biblical times. In Ensor’s version of the story, a rather classical-looking Christ surrounded by figures, all copied from Michelangelo, is confronted not by a pharisee but rather by both an old man wearing a bourgeoisie hat and by a young boy who holds a coin. Demonstrating his drawing skills while paraphrasing academic art, Ensor engages the viewer in a discussion of loyalty to church or state, indirectly referencing contemporary Belgium where the Catholics were in power and property determined the right to vote. Along with these representations of narratives from the life of Christ that allude to contemporary issues or contrast materialism with spiritual values, Ensor also makes several paintings between 1887 and 1889 that mixed direct observation with biblical stories from the Old and New Testament accounts. In Adam and Eve Chased from Paradise (Plate 18), Ensor fuses an intensely optical experience of the sea and sky, dunes, and marshlands near Ostend with an imagined visualization of temptation and spiritual abandonment by adding barely rendered figures and a snake to the foreground. An angel, superimposed on the glowing orb of the sun, gestures dynamically through linear strokes of red, orange, and yellow paint, as a naked couple rushes across the foreground marshland. Conflating the brilliant warm light of the sun with the cool greens of the marshy terrain, Ensor contrasts the alluring and sensual enticement of the earthly paradise below with the loss of heaven (and the spiritual realm) above. The biblical story of the Fall of the Rebel Angels (1889, Antwerp, KMSKA) becomes the site for an ocular, visionary spectacle, a battle of color and light. Thick skeins of color and gestural line form into fleshy clashing bodies as figures struggle, fight, and rise and fall against the background sea and sky and a broad arch reminiscent of a proscenium stage. Including recognizable faces in the thick paint along with many bodies and numerous fleshy figures crowded into the foreground, Ensor reprises a compositional strategy seen in both the 1885–86 The Entry into Jerusalem and Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 completed the same year as this painting. Like the later painting, the green flags on the far left also include the double X logo of Les XX, proposing that this legendary contest between the forces of good and evil might also allude to Ensor’s strained relationship with this group. Christ Calming the Storm (1891, Ostend, Mu.ZEE) makes Ensor’s interpretative and perceptual presence evident through gestural marks of color that coalesce into a churning sea and the waves of an ocean storm. Once again Ensor employs the material

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substance of paint applied with a directness drawn from observation as the pretext for exploring aspects of Christ’s humanity as manifested in the physical world. Indeed, despite the presence of the figure of Christ in the boat that pushes this scene toward religious allegory, the underlying seascape based in observation along with a Turnerlike vortex of sea and sky, envelopes both this religious figure and the audience in a painterly abyss. Religious allegory becomes then yet another way for Ensor to recycle academic tradition while establishing his reputation as a modern artist willing to use his art practice to address the concerns of contemporary political and social life. Remaking the observable material world into his own expressive theater of artifice and invention, Ensor, as and like Christ, could enact miraculous interventions intent on addressing his contemporaries with the social, moral, political, and spiritual efficacy of his artistic vision.

Temptation and Modernity Ensor’s drawing and etching, Temptation of Christ (T.60) (Figure 3.12), of 1888, based on the Gospel of Matthew (4: 8–10), focuses on another theme Ensor frequently addressed, that of temptation in modern times with its narratives of moral struggle and spiritual perseverance against the allure of material wealth, fame, and pleasure. In both the drawing and print, Ensor depicts Satan as an imposing winged devil-angel who tempts Christ by gesturing with his clawed hand over a view of a vast city. Christ, unswayed by this view of a sprawling metropolis that includes the Brussels Palace of Justice and City Hall among its architectural monuments, looks instead toward the setting sun on the horizon. This combination of the devil and the modern city, as well as the implied struggle between material rewards and spiritual redemption, recall the writings of Gustave Flaubert, especially his Temptation of St. Anthony inspired by the life of the third-century hermit Anthony the Great of Egypt (c.251–356). In Flaubert’s 1874 edition of the text, Anthony and the Devil, seen, as that of Ensor’s image, from a similar high vantage point, are tempted by a vision of Alexandria and Constantinople in the fading light of the setting sun. Figure 3.12  James Ensor, Temptation of Christ, 1/1, 1888, etching on Japan paper, 7.9 × 12 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus, PK.MP.01203 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

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Filled with strange apparitions, fantastic detail, and erotic fantasy, Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony stimulated the imaginations of a whole generation of artists and writers. Like the young French philosopher Emile Hennequin (1850–88), for many, Flaubert’s text offered a prophetically modern and fitting model for the disaffected artist: The pessimism which provokes in him a nostalgia for the beautiful at the sight of beings and objects without nobility is complicit in him with that which affects all artists, the acuity that they have to feel suffering which causes a general and delicate excess of sensibility, a sociological pessimism, that “indignation” about everything that gives to great minds the appearance of idiocy passing in them as incompetence, the lassitude that implies to the modern artist that his life is useless, devoid of all human interest.20

As Hennequin’s essay makes clear, Flaubert’s Temptation gave voice to the alienation of the fin de siècle artist and their despair over the role of art in a materialist society. A stock character in the marionette theater of Belgium’s rural foires foraines, the tale of St. Anthony laid bare through its irreverent slapstick, sarcastic, absurdist discourse, and the crude, awkward gestures of puppets, the transgressive potential of the old saint’s frustrations and confusion. Henry Rivière’s shadow play about St. Anthony’s temptation, first performed in Paris at the Chat Noir on December 28, 1887, underscored the continued popularity of Flaubert’s novel. In Rivière’s version, forty projections of overlapping silhouettes covered in colored paper pierced with holes created a cinematic effect of depth and intense illusion. Combined with an erudite blend of biblical and modern references and recognizable musical motifs from Schumann, Gounod, and Wagner, including his “Ride of the Valkyrie,” as well as satirical references to current political and social issues, Rivière’s play reinforced the Temptation’s topicality and contemporary relevance. Belgian artists and writers, including Ensor and his Les XX colleagues, were also inspired by Flaubert’s novel. Fernand Khnopff exhibited his painting After Flaubert (1883, Brussels, Gillon-Crowet Collection) at the first Les XX salon in 1884, and Félicien Rops showed his startling and provocative Temptation of St. Anthony (1878, Brussels, KBR) (Figure 4.12), owned by Edmond Picard, at the same salon. Drawn to St. Anthony’s struggle with temptation, in the later 1880s and 1890s Ensor devoted three paintings to the subject, one large collage drawing, two smaller drawings, and an etching.21 His initial exploration, Tribulations of St. Anthony (Plate 19), first shown at the 1890 Les XX salon, was based not on Flaubert’s novel but rather on a Jacques Callot print and Hieronymus Bosch’s painting on the same subject depicting St. Anthony near Hell and not the desert of the legend.22 In Ensor’s painting, a hooked-nosed St. Anthony sits atop a dung heap, behind a book, the source of his visions. Clothed in a red hooded robe, the saint, distracted from his reading, looks toward a mountain of garbage and debris that includes musical instruments, female nudes, and grotesque heads. The foreground with fish, lobster, oysters, and even a frog scattered about, takes on the smells and stench of the fish market, even as devils squat, piss, and shit, and at

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the painting’s right edge, a large-eared man prepares to administer an enema with a large syringe. Devils, reptilian monsters, strange hybrids, and insect-like bodies invade the water and sky, as they rise from the water to expel passengers from a sailboat and a hot-air balloon and fly about carrying hapless souls down toward a burning building. Still more strange figures are dragged ashore toward this fiery furnace by devils and peculiar figures including a red dinosaur, while the white temples in the background link the space of hell with classical ideals and the academy. These grotesque hybrid bodies invade the pictorial space, lending the painting its enigmatic and terrifying allure. Inspired perhaps by specimens and microbes that Ensor could have seen through Mariette Rousseau’s microscope or, just as likely, discovered in lantern slide projections and illustrated scientific journals promoting recent discoveries in the natural sciences, Ensor imagines a rich, painterly, and fantastic world filled with strange and exotic creatures. At the same time, Ensor’s vision of St. Anthony’s tribulations subverts the escapism of the story that attracted so many artists at this time. Supplanting the visual pleasure of looking with an abject surface representing the dystopic environmental hell of St. Anthony’s vision, in Ensor’s version, the hermit saint is surrounded by a repugnant surface made up of bilious brown, bloody red, and manure yellow paint. In the 1880s, especially in urban spaces where fear of contamination was commonplace, references to defecation and decay most certainly would have been associated with disease and death. Certainly, Ensor’s contemporaries would have recognized in the swollen lesions on the saint’s face the disease of syphilis and signs of contagion on the monstrous faces that peer out from the slime and piles of muck. Indeed the oozing surface of this canvas, reminiscent of body excretions, along with Ensor’s depictions of monsters and devils that resemble illustrations of organisms and germs found in popular magazines and newspapers reflected with expressive directness the general public’s anxiety and fear of infection brought on by recent cholera and tuberculosis epidemics. For Ensor, St. Anthony’s tribulations encompass not only contagion but also, as the piles of detritus make clear, worldly possessions, sexual desire, and excessive power, all elements with the potential of overtaking and contaminating the individual. Contrasting the saint’s self-abnegation and piety with the fetid, impure milieu that surrounds him, Ensor sarcastically comments on the materialist priorities and social hypocrisy of his contemporary world while sustaining the need for individual resistance and perseverance against temptation. Ensor returns to the theme of a saintly figure in a polluted, materialistic world in his large collage drawing entitled The Temptation of St. Anthony (Plate 20) also dating from 1887. Comparable in scale and complexity to the artist’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 begun the following year, this drawing/collage, assembled from fifty-one sheets taken from his sketchbooks and mounted on canvas, portrays St. Anthony’s story on a grand Wagnerian scale. Framed by an arch that suggests both a proscenium and an altarpiece, the nearly six-feet high and five-feet wide drawing is filled top to bottom with imagery including goddesses, grotesque monsters, a mock sea battle, several temples, musicians in a cart and at the center, the humble beardless monk Anthony kneeling in prayer on what resembles a theater stage. Joining one sheet

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of paper to another, reworking older drawings and adding new ones, working from observation and imagination, Ensor constructs this drawing in a generative manner, one that allows his imagination to take flight and combine, as had Flaubert, references from both contemporary life and obscure, erudite sources. On the page allotted to him in the catalogue for the 1888 Les XX Salon where he had initially intended to exhibit the drawing, Ensor quotes a passage on St. Anthony from Vie des Saints (Life of the Saints) by the German Catholic theologian Alban Stolz (1808–88) (Figure 1.10). Intent on popularizing Catholic dogma, Stolz’s text focuses on the devil’s tempting Anthony’s human desires, mainly through sexual lust. Ensor’s drawing includes only a few references to sexual temptation. Instead, he accents Anthony’s resistance to a corrupt and perverse civilization, linking his drawing directly to Flaubert’s 1874 text. While Ensor retains in his drawing Stolz’s description of Christ as appearing in a radiant light, his inclusion of this text in the Les XX catalog was no doubt meant as defiant reply to Stolz’s ultramontane views and antagonistic critique of Freemasons, a group associated in the press with Les XX. Ensor’s drawing includes topical references along with free invention and imagery drawn from a range of sources to make St. Anthony’s temptation relevant to modern Belgium. At the center, a resolute yet supplicant St. Anthony is surrounded by the many temptations that seek to distract his saintly demeanor. In the left foreground, a group of top-hatted bourgeoisie with chicken bodies march behind a larger-scaled bespectacled man. Some of the men have signs inserted in their hats that refer to food and gluttonous appetites with one arrogantly proclaiming: “Long live Saint Pride” (“VIVE LE SAINT L’ORGUEIL”). One of these bourgeois men covers his face with a mask while another blindly follows, his head covered completely by his top hat. Most have blotchy skin and weak chins, signs of degeneracy and disease, and hooked noses, often associated in contemporary caricatures with Jews and deceitful behavior. The man at the head of this group wears a top hat reworked from its original cone shape resembling a Judenhut that identifies him as Jewish. His face and head, covered with warts allude to infection and depravity, while his broad nose, large ears, and glasses imply deception or falsity. As he offers an oblation to the saint, Ensor accents this figure’s bestial attributes, drawing him with pointed hands, claw-like fingers, and a shoulder that resembles a bird’s wing. Although the sash the man wears and the decorative trim of his robe declare fidelity to St. Anthony as well as the saints Labre, Julien, and Émillion,23 the blue-winged monster defecating into the bowl he is holding along with the vulgar indecency of the winged monster’s act of fellatio (later covered with a patch), make it clear that these declarations of devotion to St. Anthony are devious, profane, and obscene. Above this parade of decadent bourgeois, Ensor drew a toothy grinning monster with an exploding head and the Les XX emblem drawn on his robe. More references to contemporary Belgium can be seen above this figure as bird-legged figures dressed in civil guard uniforms and wearing bird, camel, and goat masks who point their rifles toward a mob rushing in from the right. The crowd replies by thrusting their lances, passing wind and spitting at their opponents. A group of hybrid creatures with human and features resembling iguanodon dinosaur skeletons follow the civic guard,24 while at the far left, a cannon emits a volley of worm-like microbes, bugs, snails, tiny dragons,

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and fantastic creatures conjuring up a nightmare vision of germs and contagion that further pollutes St. Anthony’s surroundings. As if to signify the claustrophobic crush of the modern city, dense crowds fill the space around the saint’s head, including tiny figures in uniforms firing bayonets or cannons that resemble stage spotlights, adding a theatrical quality to the whole. Directly above St. Anthony another crowd of people is menaced by a skeletal figure holding a scythe. This ongoing and constantly changing battle, a mock depiction perhaps, of the forces of good and evil, is juxtaposed with large-scaled figures including several nudes, a multi-breasted haloed goddess, skeletons, and creatures with worm tales that rise and float through the air evoking both fantasy and fear. On the right side of the drawing, strange devil-like creatures, naked grotesque pregnant women, skeletal demons, crustaceans, fish, and squid proliferate around St. Anthony. Nearby, a troupe of commedia dell’arte performers and musicians seated in a cart with large wheels play a variety of odd or cracked instruments providing musical accompaniment to this strange spectacle. As with many of the other figures in this composite drawing, Ensor exaggerates and distorts faces and adds masks, caricatures, or images drawn from popular culture to underscore the scene’s burlesque nature. In one purposefully offending section, he includes a Jesuit priest with bare buttocks who climbs onto the cart. Taking this rude denigration of religious authority one step further and playing upon the slang expression for passing wind, Ensor inserts a horn in his buttocks. Above the priest, a nude holds a shofar inscribed with the words: “Father rise up, kill and eat!” (“Pierre leve toi! Tue et mange!”) from Flaubert’s text of St. Peter’s vision while also implying that the saint too should partake in this melee of consumption and excess. Much of this almost encyclopedic array of human depravity and destruction takes place in and around a vast architectural complex filled with arches, columns, and, at the upper right, a temple complete with its resident deity. Although suggestive of Alexandria or Constantinople where Flaubert’s novel is set, these buildings could also just as easily be the neo-classical facades of central Brussels or the stage set for an immersive and grand theater production like those found in contemporary stagings of Wagner’s operas. Other references to imperialism and the Belgian King Leopold II’s colonial expansion with the creation of the Congo Free State in 1885 are found throughout the drawing including a standing figure with a high-feathered conical headdress holding a spear and shield in front of a banner with four yellow stars that resembles the flag of the newly acquired territory, an elephant with tusks (possibly referencing the ivory trade), and an upside-down train at the upper left. Other allusions to Africa and the Congo can be seen in the near-naked body of an African tribesman partaking in a ritual involving blood and a slaughtered boar, a grinning corpulent man next to St. Anthony and several women whose exaggerated and fleshy nude torsos recall the public display of the non-Western bodies in the popular press and at universal exhibitions. Along with the train, the hot air balloon and steamship at the top left similarly connect these colonized bodies to modern life and technology. Ensor’s images of bourgeois conformity and excess are countered by a repoussoir figure of a cowled monk at the bottom right who is about to swallow a large fish. This figure represents Benedict (Benoit) Joseph Labre (1748–83), an association  made

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clear by both the labre fish the man holds and the name on the sash on the figure offering oblation at Anthony’s left. Canonized by Leo XIII on December 8, 1881, Labre was regarded by many as a prophet, holy fool, and healer. Ensor, whose own chosen attribute was also a fish, associates himself in this drawing by adding his signature to the body of the pious eighteenth-century monk. Labre’s act of eating this simple meal, a sign of his saintly poverty and renunciation of the material world, counters the strutting bourgeois procession on the other side of Anthony while also alluding to Christ’s miraculous multiplication of fish. The figure of Labre also serves as the base of a compositional triangle that is represented by the top-hatted bourgeoisie at the left, and at its apex, the large head of Christ floating above Anthony in a monstrance. As Labre’s head looks toward Saint Anthony, his eating the fish becomes act of resistance to the temptations of the modern world all around him and a sign of spiritual renewal. Contrasting Saints Julien, Emilion, and Labre associated, as St. Anthony, with spiritual asceticism, to the grotesque parade of fowl bourgeois and their bird/devil leader, marching dinosaurs and civil guard, grotesque women, and surging crowds, Ensor makes it clear that he intends his drawing to be confrontational, critical, and ironic. Updating the temptation narrative, Ensor surrounds Anthony with the signifiers of colonial power and modern, technologically advanced Belgium even as he indites his contemporaries for their excessive and grotesque behavior, crimes against humanity, and even the preference, in Catholic Belgium, for a religious tradition that prefers torture or crucifixion to the expression of individual belief. Along with numerous depictions of frenzy, violence, torture, and murder, Ensor’s collage plunges the viewing public into a monumental inventory of human depravity, contagion, sin, and crime that has spread like the plague to infect and corrupt all, except for St. Anthony, who remains a resolute and visionary individual on this altar/stage of modern society. As each sheet blends into the next like the succeeding screens of a shadow play, Ensor presents St. Anthony’s temptation as an unfolding dream and cinematic, evershifting, multilayered experiential enactment, one that, like Flaubert’s text, is happening in both the present and the past, is intensely immediate and hallucinatory, and occurs concurrently in both the spiritual and physical world. In this process of production and free association, reference, and fantastic invention, Ensor creates a direct experience not unlike a theater performance, simultaneously modern and allegorical, that emphasizes both the relevancy of St. Anthony’s temptation and the central role and personal integrity of the social individual to contemporary life. In this fashion, Ensor gives agency to the engaged and visionary perspective of the artist, who, in remaining true to his unique way of seeing, can, like St. Anthony, resist temptation and persevere.

The Multiple Narratives of Christ’s Entry into Brussels 1889 A year after he completed both the drawing Temptation of St. Anthony and the painting Tribulations of St. Anthony, Ensor began Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (Plate 1) where he represents the social narrative of his art practice on a monumental scale.

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Combining elements of The Entry into Jerusalem from the Halos of Christ series and details from the Temptation of St. Anthony, in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Ensor stages an imaginative, even visionary interpretation of contemporary experience while also advancing the central importance of the individual’s (and Ensor’s) critical and expressive response to contemporary Belgian society. Like the drawing of The Temptation of St. Anthony, in this painting Ensor envisions the scene of Christ entering Brussels as a vast public spectacle with a large crowd marching down a wide boulevard under a red banner that, as discussed in Chapter 1, announces with revolutionary fervor: “Long Live the Social One.” The banner’s salutary appeal to many publics and the inclusion of the date 1889 in its title purposefully links Christ’s Entry with Socialism, mass demonstration, and the subversive discourse of Mardi Gras. Ensor originally planned to exhibit this painting at Les XX the same year that marked the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution as well as the meeting of the Second International in Paris with the Belgian Workers Party in attendance for the first time. Under this red banner hailing the “social one,” Ensor proclaims his central role as an artist, social critic, and savior. Christ’s Entry originally included many of the same signs and placards as The Entry into Jerusalem, overtly linking this Mardi Gras celebration with the many overlapping discourses of modern Belgium’s political, social, cultural, and mercantile reality. An 1898 etching (T.114, E 118) (Figure 3.13) made after the painting provides evidence

­Figure 3.13  James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels at Mardi Gras in 1889, 2/3, 1898, etching, 24.8 × 35.7 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.09502 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

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of the Christ’s Entry’s competing narratives might have been, with even more direct reference to Socialism and the BWP than The Entry into Jerusalem: “Long Live Anseele and Jesus,” “Vive Denblon,”25 “Long Live Jesus and the Reforms,” with only “The Grateful Samaritan” retaining a reference to narrative’s biblical past. By the time he made this print, Ensor’s social priorities had changed, however. Now the declaration “Long Live the Social One,” no longer written on a banner and much diminished in scale and prominence, appears on a balcony at the middle right. By the time he exhibited the painting at his 1929 retrospective, Ensor had covered over most of the more political and topical texts, making it less provocative than when he had first intended to show it at Les XX. He retained, however, the red banner allied with socialist and anarchist causes, and its declaration, “Long live the Social One” announcing to all the powerful alliance of the social and the individual while sustaining the large painting’s satirical, confrontational thrust. As it extends across the broad Brussels boulevard, the banner and its socialist refrain join the modern city with “Sociale,” a Prudhonian term for urban industrial workers that, as Maurice Agulhon noted, relates to the 1848 Republic where Marianne is associated with the red flag, the democracy of Jacobian tradition, as well as the antipolitical Utopian tradition.26 Ensor makes a similar alliance in Christ’s Entry where below the banner Marianne can be seen wearing her red Phrygian cap. Ensor’s Marianne kisses the middle-class man next to her, seemingly embracing bourgeois values, but it soon becomes apparent that as a member of the parading crowd, her act can also be read as a subversive seduction of the bourgeois. Directly below the banner with “Sociale,” Christ, recognizable as Ensor himself and almost overlooked by the parading crowd, hails the surrounding masked figures with his raised hand and, by implication, the general public Yet even as Christ/Ensor greets his contemporaries, his accommodating gesture is ignored by the military band directly in front of him. Marching forward in an undifferentiated ensemble of uniforms, many with oversized heads and faces painted in white or exaggerated shades of pink, orange, and red, and wearing ribbons and medals. Marching forward the band becomes the embodiment of conformity and the nearby placard that states: “Doctrinaire Fanfares Always Succeed” an ironic comment on orthodoxy, especially in Belgium where doctrinaire referred to conservative Liberals. Ensor’s mocking rebuke of Belgium’s ruling elite continues with the foreground crowd that includes members of the bourgeois, the military, and the judiciary. Combining the exaggeration and distortion typically found in contemporary caricature with the artifice and excess of carnival performance, Ensor presents a purposefully irreverent jumble of realistic description and masking. This crowd mixes carnival with the sarcastic critique of parody: several figures wear elaborate, colorful masks similar to those often found in leftist caricatures while others are dressed as Pierrot and Harlequins, the same commedia dell’arte characters regularly used by the Catholic press to mock Socialist leaders as charlatans. Ensor even makes an appearance as a yellow Pierrot in the left middle ground crowd of carnival revelers, a reference perhaps to his identification with socialist causes. Completing Ensor’s carnival travesty, at the center, a bloated strutting drum major leads the parade, replacing Littré, who could be seen in the foreground of The Entry into Jerusalem.

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With its mix of high and low, commerce and art, Christ’s Entry recalls many contemporary antecedents. George Cruikshank and Henry Mayhew’s satirical novel, London in 1851 or The Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and family (London: George Newbold, 1851), has been often cited as a prototype for both The Entry into Jerusalem and Christ’s Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. Like Ensor, Cruikshank and Mayhew include a banner across the top situating the scene in the immediacy of the political present and they too invite the viewing public to join the densely packed crowd. These English printmakers present nineteenth-century London and Regents Circle as a broad panorama where a boisterous but closely packed throng move about as they make their way toward the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Ensor likewise presents a large procession, now a carnival parade, that presses forward toward the viewer. As well, both Cruikshank and Mayhew’s print and Ensor’s painting depict an urban milieu awash in commerce and text—billboards, posters, and banners that promote the competing agendas of the modern city. Cruikshank and Mayhew even audaciously marketed themselves by inserting a placard with their names in the crowd at the lower right. Ensor also wants to sell his message to the public, but does so indirectly, through the red banner and by including the placard hailing Jesus as king of Brussels in the foreground. By locating his entry within the space of everyday commerce and utilizing the vantage point of the street as both a narrative and satirical device, Ensor, like Cruikshank and Mayhew, employs vernacular popular culture as a rhetorical device for social comment and critique. Félicien Rops’s depictions of the Belgian city and country life, Printemps (Spring) and Civic Guard (Brussels, KBR, Print Cabinet) originally published in the satirical Uylenspiegel revue, have a similar theme and composition. Certainly Ensor, who knew Rops and exhibited with him at Lex XX and La Chrysalide, could have seen either the lithograph or its reproduction in Uylenspiegel. Like Ensor’s painting, Civic Guard includes banners, parading soldiers, and even a drum major while Spring depicts a rowdy crowd leaving a city. Both of Rops’s prints fill the entire surface with a dense gathering of the middle and lower classes. While his nod to Rops’s earlier representation of the city and the crowd acknowledges their shared interest in using caricature and satire to comment on contemporary politics and social issues, Ensor takes his satire of Belgian society further. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” the French writer Charles Baudelaire called the crowded city boulevard the site of modernity. But after the upheaval and destruction of the French Commune, the same modern city street that had so inspired Baudelaire became a source of anxiety and fear among the middle class who claimed the city as their own. In Christ’s Entry, Ensor immerses his audience in the spectacle of the urban street so celebrated by Baudelaire, only now the wide Brussels boulevard has become a contested space of celebration and commemoration, carnival and commerce, surveillance and public dissent. As the crowd presses forward, the beholder is confronted by contemporary concerns about lower classes and the unruly mob, anxieties that had only increased with the strikes, worker unrest, and large street demonstrations of the 1880s. Ensor had encountered emerging theories on group psychology and the crowd, more than likely through his contacts with the Rousseau circle and in particular

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Edmond Picard, who was very interested in psychology and mass behavior. Gustave Le Bon, who published his first essay on crowd psychology, Man and Society, in 1881, later developed these ideas into his influential theory of the crowd in The Psychology of Crowds, first published in Paris in 1895. Summarizing the studies of Hippolyte Taine, Gabriel Tarde, and other psychologists who had also analyzed mass behavior, Le Bon defined the crowd, made up of workers, women, children, and other lower-class types, as instinctual, capricious, prone to violence, and threatening to the stability and social propriety of the other classes. The crowd first appeared in Ensor’s work in his The Entry into Jerusalem, soon followed in 1886 with etching The Cathedral (T7) (Figure  3.14) and the drawing of The Temptation of St. Anthony discussed above. On view at Les XX’s salons of 1887 and 1888, The Entry into Jerusalem and The Cathedral depict, as would Christ’s Entry, large crowds that fill urban spaces. In the Entry into Jerusalem the crowd consists of demonstrating workers marching for Christ and Socialism (as the signs and inclusion of Anseele and Demblon’s names make clear) while in The Cathedral, the crowd is participating in a religious or carnival procession with the foreground figures wearing a mix of contemporary and exotic headdresses followed by a parading military band. Both works look down on the crowd from a high vantage point and the same compositional arrangement that fills both the middle and foreground with bodies, heads, and faces. Whether in the smaller format of the etching or the larger Figure 3.14  James Ensor, The Cathedral, 1886. Etching on zinc in black with hand-coloring on cream wove paper, 24.5 × 17.8 cm, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago 1953.268 (© photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, NY)

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scaled The Entry into Jerusalem and Christ’s Entry, these crowds, masked or not, are overwhelming in their numbers and density. As Christ’s Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, The Cathedral links the crowd with religion with half the space taken up by a cathedral so large that it dwarfs the parading masses below. The cathedral is not drawn from observation but is instead a composite of three churches seen from slightly different viewpoints. While indebted to his source material, the stark contrasts of light and shadow of the cathedral’s nave and apse continue Ensor’s ongoing study of light, developed with the same accumulation of detail and delicate line as in the Halos of Christ series of drawings from the same period. The Cathedral engages with current crowd theory in an ambivalent way, with the group closest to the base of the cathedral countervailing contemporary perspectives on crowd behavior. Marked by an orderly rhythm, with row upon row of tiny regimented figures marching in unison behind the band, this large crowd moves forward, their very magnitude and conformity appearing to sustain the cathedral, that, despite its massive form and scale, appears to hover as if it was a religious float held aloft by the devoted masses. Hardly the degenerate crowd of Le Bon’s delineation, this crowd in its unanimity and supportive role becomes the very embodiment of the authority and presence of the Catholic Church in Belgian daily life. Yet even as this disciplined group processes and swells to fill the broad boulevard, they butt up against a more diverse and heterogeneous crowd, some of whom turn to observe the march and others who counter and block the band’s forward progress by moving from right to left. This rowdy, jostling, libertine throng, a mix of the exotic and ordinary, appears to celebrate its lack of direction and disarray, engulfing the viewing audience in the disparate anarchy of the street. Like the carnival crowd in the front of The Cathedral, the foreground crowd in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889  marches in several directions at the same time, becoming increasingly disorderly and more chaotic. Filled with masked figures, discordant color contrasts, exaggerated forms, and juxtaposition of bodies large and small, this parading group presses forward in a claustrophobic crush. But rather than the unruly lower classes commonly cited in contemporary literature and later in Le Bon’s studies, the crowd of Christ’s Entry is made up of a raucous group of bourgeois, representatives of the church and parliament, and a military band—in other words, Belgium’s ruling class. With their grimacing mouths, swollen bellies, red, and at times hooked noses, and skeletal faces, this ludicrous chorus line of conformity and hypocrisy struts before the beholder, transformed by Ensor’s caricatural intervention and satiric inversion into a parody of social propriety that ironically embodies all that the bourgeois feared about the working classes. In Christ’s Entry into Brussels, religious allegory intermingles with the discourse of street and carnival, as contemporary politics and social life jostle with Christian narratives, nineteenth-century music and literature, and the coarse humor of satire. At the center of it all Ensor celebrates his presence as Christ the “social one” proclaiming his independence from doctrinaire fanfares. Asserting the primacy of anarchistic individualism and his own critique of modern Belgium, Ensor submerges the viewing public in the spectacle of their own grotesque conformity as they parade along the broad boulevard.

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Belgium in the Nineteenth Century: Satire and Politics Although it is sometimes claimed that Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 was rejected by Les XX in 1888, in reality, as noted in the last chapter, Ensor never sent it to any of the group’s salon, nor did he exhibit the painting in public until his 1929 retrospective. However, even if Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 remained in his studio, Ensor did not shy away from making work that spoke to current social and political issues, continuing to explore the imagery, narratives, sources, and strategies developed in this large painting to produce works filled with biting satire and critique. Some of these works were sharply critical of Belgium’s ruling order, including King Leopold II, the army and civil guard, and the legal establishment. Others lampooned bourgeoisie taste or commented on broader social issues including debates over science and contagion. Extending his interest in allegory and history painting, Ensor made drawings and prints on historical subjects that included references to contemporary concerns and other works inspired by current literature, especially the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. Ensor also turned some of these works into etchings that were often embellished with colored pencil and gouache. Ensor created his most radical and political images in 1888 and 1889, a time of social unrest in Belgium. One of the more violent clashes happened in Ensor’s hometown of Ostend on August 23, 1887, during the height of the tourist season. A strike by local fisherman protesting English incursion into local commercial fishing rights led to a violent confrontation with the civic guard that left two fishermen critically wounded. The next day when protesters attempted to board English vessels in the port, the civic guard fired on the demonstrators and seven Ostend fishermen were killed. Although Ensor knew of Le Globe illustré’s report on the event, even making a copy of the cover illustration, his provocatively entitled Massacre of the Ostend Fisherman (also known as The Strike) (Plate 21) did not follow newspaper accounts of the event. Overlooking the actions of the fisherman who had destroyed baskets of fish that had been caught by the English, Ensor instead presents the strike as a tragic melodrama with rioting police pitted against noble fishermen and their families. Using the same collage technique as The Temptation of St. Anthony, Ensor mounted pages from his sketchbook on cardboard creating a broad panoramic stage for the unfolding drama. Taverns drawn on each side act like theatrical scrims. At the right, figures seated in rowed tiers as if in theater boxes both observe and participate in the action unfolding before them as they jeer, hurl fish, empty chamber pots, vomit, and defecate. On the left, other townsfolk declare their loyalty to the local fishermen by hoisting a flag depicting a herring and an octopus while others pull up a basket with the initials “J.E. II” (a reference to Ensor, his father, and his English ancestry). Near the center, a soldier appears to have taken a pratfall on a pile of horseshit. These burlesque elements offer a visceral counter-discourse to the grotesque violence that moves across the panels, culminating in the center with the townsfolk set against the rigidly posed and rather pompous-looking civic guard and military grenadier wearing large bearskin hats. These gendarmes (and a figure near the center whose profile and bears a resemblance to King Leopold II) attack not only the fishermen,

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one of whom stands defiantly near the center of the drawing, but also women and children. Unlike the actual event where the civic guard fired on unarmed protestors as they commandeered boats at the dock, in Ensor’s version the action takes place in the town square where the police indiscriminately attack with graphic, bloody, brutal, unrelenting aggression. The Ostend fishermen and other townsfolk are stomped on, stabbed, and struck with bayonets. Blood flows from the neck of one victim. On both sides, women cower in fear while others, both men and women, face off against the soldiers and yell out or gesture in protest. In the right foreground, a pregnant woman, her belly punctured and bleeding, is covered with a Belgian flag and attended by a man and a child. Other victims have fallen to the ground or try to escape but the soldiers continue their assault. Ensor’s focus on the central section is complimented by several rippling flags that add theatrical pageantry to the scene while also conveying the struggle between the national interests and the socialist cause of the striking fisherman. At the upper right, a large Belgian flag arcs as it waves freely while beneath it, a red flag flies from a pole topped with a fish. Other flags link the right to the left panel where an English Union Jack rises to the top of a mast along with other nautical flags including a flag from the East Indian Company, even as a large sail unfurls with a man hanging from its rigging. The swirling flags also act as a veil, covering over a group of figures that were perhaps earlier drawings. With their satiated expressions and indifferent glances, this group of figures appears to be looking on from a balcony or theater box while below the fishermen and women perform defiant acts of resistance. As Ensor’s 1888 etching, The Gendarmes (T.55) and 1892 painting (Figure 3.15), also based on the Ostend strike, make clear, the events of August 1887 symbolized not only the plight of the fisherman but also the abuse of power and corruption within the Belgium political and legal system. The interior setting of The Gendarmes with its two supine figures on a bed surrounded by several men is based upon a well-known history painting by Louis Gallait, The Last Honors Rendered to Counts Egmont and Horne (1851, Tournai, MBA). This tale of two noblemen, Counts Egmont and Horne, executed in 1568 by the Spanish who then occupied the country, spoke of patriotism, individual sacrifice, and freedom from an oppressive foreign rule that for many Belgians embodied the values of their independent state. Inverting Gallait’s image, Ensor substituted the heads of two fishermen for those of the counts, perversely transforming this historical glorification of two martyrs for freedom from Belgian’s past into a scene of state oppression where the heroes are not noblemen but poor working-class men. Rather than the loyal admirers that surround the noblemen in Gallait’s painting, the fishermen are encircled in both the etching and painting by the police, the very representatives of the Belgian state whose use of force and oppressive enforcement of the rule of law led to the men’s “martyrdom” for their belief in the right to earn a living. In some versions of the etching, Ensor includes hand-colored embellishments to underline his provocative purpose: adding touches of red crayon and watercolor that make the mortal wombs of the dead fishermen even more obvious and red to the bayonet of the policeman in the middle group, an aspect that is reinforced in the later painting by the inclusion of another gendarme in the foreground who wipes blood off his sword. In the etching, this policeman holds a coin, an allusion

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Figure  3.15  James Ensor, The Gendarmes, 1892, oil and pencil on panel, 45 × 55 cm, Ostend Mu. ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Cedric Verhelst)

perhaps to the silver coins of Judas’s betrayal or money stolen from the dead men. While the police stand by, their commander, who resembles King Leopold II, gestures toward a woman in the doorway as another soldier raises his bayonet, insinuating that these deaths are linked to official governmental directives. In the painting, Ensor is even more direct in his condemnation of police brutality and government cover-up. The police, all with similar coarse, bulbous noses and elaborate mustaches, look dissolute as they display the coin and wipe blood off a bayonet, their silence and complicity having been bought. Broadening his critique in the painting Ensor includes one judge who looks on the scene from a window while another kisses Marianne. He also adds a nun and a priest on either side of the bed, no doubt a reference to the Catholic Party, then in control of the Belgian parliament. Culpability, Ensor implies, is shared by all in the room: the nun who raises a hand, as if prayers or a blessing can justify police brutality, as well as the civic officials who appear to witness the scene but fail to intervene. Even Marianne, the symbol of Liberty has forgotten her role, with Ensor suggesting in this image that freedom and the law are otherwise occupied. While the troop’s commander, standing at the door, his hat festooned with the liberty cockade, no longer sports the long beard that might connect him to Leopold II, he appears to scold the townsfolk who try to enter, even as another gendarme raises his bayonet. In the background, the town square has filled with

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protestors who gather around the doorway to witness the scene and wave red flags. As portrayed by Ensor in the painting, the police and the state, the church and the courts cannot hide the injustice of their actions, nor can they quell the heroic protest of the Ostend fishermen and women. Ensor is even more confrontational in Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (Plate 25) of the following year, which directly links the Belgian king with violence against the working class. Rendered in graphite and red and blue colored pencil, this “elevated drawing” (as Ensor listed it when he exhibited it at Les XX in 1891) depicts Leopold as a god-like figure who looks down upon yet another police action, this time against a Socialist demonstration. Like Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, a crowd again fills the foreground, only now rather than the middle-class revelers, Ensor presents a rioting national guard attacking mainly women and children. Marching forward in rows, the guardsmen cut through the marchers, causing some to flee, and others to cry out or raise their fists in protest. One woman, wounded in her chest falls back into the crowd, another demonstrator is threatened by a pistol, and a woman flees with her child. On the right, several figures look on, and Ensor signs the drawing as if he too is one of the witnesses. Every bit of the lower half of the drawing is filled with movement, mayhem, and the press of bodies, the horror vacui of the scene a visceral embodiment of the hysteria and violence of the mob but one that in Ensor’s ironic version is created by the actions of the Belgian state, not its people. A banner at the top declares its relevance to the present day: this is “Belgium in the 19th Century”. Larger in scale than the crowd below and placed hierarchically at the center of the composition, King Leopold gazes with closed eyes through his lorgnette. Even though a demonstrator thrusts a large red flag toward him with calls for “Personal Service, Obligatory Instruction, and Universal Suffrage,” the king’s response is a patronizing dismissal, articulated by the text written in curving arcs directly below him for all to read: “What do you want? Are you not happy? A little patience No Violence.” The last line, closest to the crowd declares “I can see something, but I don’t know for what cause. I can’t distinguish it very well.”27 This phrase, taken from Florian’s fable, The Monkey and the Magical Lantern, about a monkey who invites his friends to a slide show but forgets to light the lantern, is spoken by a not too bright turkey, who, unlike the others, thinks he sees something. Now repeated by Leopold, the words insinuate that the Belgian king only sees what he wants to see, enunciating his indifference to the causes presented by the people. The texts perform double duty both underscoring the haughty disregard of the Belgian king and implicating those who read and look on (that would have been the middle-class patrons at Les XX when this drawing was exhibited in 1891) in the massacre of the demonstrators that rush toward them. Another “elevated drawing,” also exhibited at Les XX in 1891, was in fact an etching with pastel and colored pencil embellishments. Provocatively entitled Doctrinal Nourishment (T.79) (Figure 3.16), it clearly shows Ensor’s intention of offending the bourgeoisie. Once again King Leopold II makes an appearance, now in the center of a group that includes representatives of the church, state, and military. Perched on a wide semicircular ledge, perhaps a balcony or platform, the king and his associates, their buttocks bared, excrete streams of feces on groups of eager open-mouthed

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Figure 3.16  James Ensor, Doctrinal Nourishment, 1889, etching, 18.9 × 25.1 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus, PK.MP.09498 (photo: https://dams. antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

followers assembled below. As if presenting such a scatological portrait of the king is not scandalous enough, Ensor includes a placard at the top with the words “Belgium in 1889” along with the title that situates the scene in the very contemporaneous present. Three of the defecating figures hold up cards that refer to the same concerns listed in Belgium in the Nineteenth Century. On the far right, a general holds a sign that reads “personal service,” a reference to the practice where upper-class men paid their lower-class counterparts to serve the military in their stead; next to him, a balding parliamentarian clutches a placard bearing the words “universal suffrage,” a cause antithetical to this figure but central to the Belgian Worker’s Party who sought to extend the vote to working-class men, and at the far left a card with the words “obligatory instruction” held by a nun alludes to the ongoing struggle between Belgium’s Catholic and Liberal parties for control over public education. In a perverse twist of the Flemish proverb, “They all shit in the same pot” (“Zij schijten in een pot”), Ensor lampoons the king and representatives of Belgium’s ruling order who ignore the demands that have been presented to them, choosing instead to feed the masses gathered below with their foul-smelling doctrinaire drivel. Although dismissed by critics as yet another example of Ensor’s crude satirical humor, Doctrinal Nourishment only underscores the subversive and contrary nature of Ensor’s strategy of visual and verbal play. All these works employ grotesque exaggeration, base humor, and carnivalesque inversion to make their point. Drawn from Belgium’s popular folk traditions, the satirical

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press, and burlesque theater, these drawings and etchings are quite confrontational, making Ensor’s radical vision and political perspective patently clear. How could his audience not see the double entendre of image and text of Doctrinal Nourishment and Belgium in the Nineteenth Century where scatology, caricature, and argot comingle with contemporary political debates to simultaneously imagine both the adulation and public humiliation of the status quo. Coaxing the verbal into collusion with the visual, Ensor undermines one discourse, articulated by the ruling political and artistic order, by juxtaposing it with a viable and no less visible alternative drawn from the rhetoric of street and popular culture In The Wise Judges also of 1891 (Figure  3.17), Ensor turns his attention to the Belgian legal system. Using a flat, linear technique that accents his satirical intent, Ensor portrays a group of lawyers and judges lined up in two rows as if posed for a group photograph. Quite possibly inspired by Honoré Daumier’s 1845 Men of Justice series and alluding to the current fascination with physiognomy where head shape and facial expression were thought to determine moral and physical character, Ensor accents each judge’s similar broad brow and lumpy, misshapen head. While social scientists might have associated these facial deformities with degeneracy or alcoholism, for Ensor their close resemblance insinuates stultifying conformity. Dressed in their look-alike red

Figure 3.17  James Ensor, The Wise Judges, 1891, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

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robes, the judges only differ in facial expressions that range from confused scowls and vacuous smiles to unconcealed boredom. The lawyers appear to be equally fatuous. With their matching black robes and elaborate mustaches, their faces frozen into masks, eyes crossed or frowning, and hats often too small for such big heads, the lawyers look foolish. To add to the general air of befuddlement, lethargy, and incompetency, Ensor adds a spider weaving a web between the two of the lawyers, while another lawyer has a nest in his hat with a just hatched egg that drips down his hat, face, and robes. Although in Ensor’s portrayal there seems to be little behind these facades of judiciary authority, they are nonetheless sitting in the courtroom, supposedly promoting the rule of law. The occasion for this assembly appears to be the trial of two men, one with a bandage wrapped around his head, seen in profile in the narrow foreground space. On the table between the defendants and the tribunal, a nose, leg and foot, head, teeth, and eye as well as a knife and saw are on display, the ghastly remnants of a horrific crime of dismemberment as absurdly macabre as any tale by Edgar Allen Poe. To the right, a lawyer for the defense who resembles Ensor (although the goatee might be linked to Edmond Picard) presents his argument before the court. Flies and all manner of pestilence spew from his mouth and snot drips from his red nose. One hand points downward toward the slang expression “Mort aux Vaches” (“Death to the Cows,” that is, “Death to the Police/Oppressors”) written just below the artist’s signature. The other hand points upward toward a painting of the Crucifixion (a crucifix would commonly be found in Belgian courtrooms), an example of a wrongful sentence that anyone in this overwhelmingly Catholic country would no doubt recognize. As the cobwebs and the skewered scales of justice above the lawyer make clear, the outcome of this trial has already been decided. Some authors have suggested that this painting is based on the famous Coucke and Goethals trial where two Flemish laborers, accused of murdering the widow Dubois from Wallonia, were tried and executed by beheading on November 16, 1860, in the main square in Charleroi, only to have the real culprits arrested a few months later. The trial was held in French, a language that the two men spoke but poorly, and became an example of how French-speaking bourgeois (from Wallonia and Flanders) viewed the Flemish, especially the lower and working classes, as well as the language and those who spoke it to be inferior. In 1873 a debate in Parliament over this trial led to the Coremans Act, one of the first laws to recognize Dutch as an official language, allowing Flemish to use their language in Flemish courts (except in Brussels). With the advent of the Flemish movement in the 1890s the travesty of this “affaire Lambin” became a cause célèbre that inspired further linguistic reform in the Belgian judiciary system. Another source for Ensor’s interest in this trial could be Jules Destrée’s call in the Journal des Tribunaux on November 21, 1889, to revisit the verdict and Coucke and Goethals culpability in the murder. Francine-Claire Legrand also sees connections between this painting and Ensor’s other overtly political works of this period and anarchist pamphlets published in the early 1890s particularly an essay published in the April 1890 issue of La Misère entitled “Les tribulations d’un juge” about an anarchist on trial.28 The Peltzer trial, held in 1882, where two brothers were accused of murdering a young Antwerp lawyer, Guillaume Bernays, might have also engaged Ensor’s interest as Edmond Picard served as a defense lawyer for one of the brothers, Armand Peltzer.

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In his summary, Picard denounced the judge, the court, and the jury to no avail. Both brothers were condemned to life in prison and Picard later used this trial as the subject of his monodrama The Juror. Whether The Wise Judges is meant to evoke the Lambin affair, trials of anarchists, or the Peltzers, it certainly lampoons Belgium’s judicial system and was no doubt intended as a provocation in Brussels, a city of lawyers and home of the monumental Palace of Justice. Layered within this satire of incompetency and inertia, however, is a more personal critique, directed at Les XX and Octave Maus, who was also a lawyer. Several members of the court are examining evidence, that is, doodled sketches held by two of the judges while the central judge holds a far more pornographic image and the lawyer behind him regards a skull. The drawings and skull, graffiti, reference to the Crucifixion, and even the body parts on the table all refer to Ensor, who defends both the poor accused men and his own transgressive art practice. Indeed by 1891, Ensor had found disapproval for his art practice not only by the critics but within Les XX itself. Although there is no evidence, Ensor claimed was nearly voted out of Les XX in 1890 and that he was only kept in by one vote. As The Wise Judges, painted the following year, hints, Ensor’s antagonistic lawyer adjures for anti-authoritarian values and the individual right to artistic expression, an argument his contemporaries Picard and Maus, both lawyers, could not ignore.

Contagion as Metaphor Joining the courts and crime together with dissection, forensic evidence, phrenology, and germs, The Wise Judges also speaks to the convergence of law, science, and medicine in the late nineteenth century, as the Belgian government developed laws and policies to regulate and police epidemics, venereal disease, mental illness, sanitation, and public health. In The Wise Judges, Ensor’s prognosis is barbed and satirical: incompetency and degeneracy have infected the court and the rule of law. In a witty inversion of current debates on the criminality of mental illness, the judges and lawyers, rather than the accused, exhibit all the physical attributes of madness, degeneration, and infectious disease. As with other works of this period, markers of contagion serve double duty, allowing Ensor to both confront contemporary views concerning physical and mental illness, deviant social behavior, and class while also satirizing current anxieties surrounding modern experience, especially concerns over hygiene, disease, and epidemic infection then at the forefront of the public’s imagination. As epidemics spread among a general population with regular frequency in the nineteenth century, breakthroughs in medical and scientific research spurred by technological advances such as more powerful microscopes led in the second half of the century to a new understanding of the biological basis of disease and how infections spread. Louis Pasteur’s discovery that dust in the air contained spores of living organisms was both frightful and fascinating, attracting the interest of scientists and artists alike. By the 1880s, Robert Koch and others, building on Pasteur’s germ theory, discovered and isolated bacilli for contagious diseases including typhoid fever (1880), diphtheria (1882), tuberculosis (1882), cholera (1883), pneumonia (1884),

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and the bubonic plague (1894). The subject of spectacle and conjecture now visible with the microscope-aided human eye, these tiny organisms affirmed positivist belief in the potential of science and technology while accentuating at the same time the fragility of human existence. Even as scientists debated their discoveries in journals and international conferences, the representation of micro-organisms in caricatures, lantern slide lectures, and illustrated novels enthralled the public while also creating the impression that germs and contagious diseases were everywhere. Inspiring fear and anxiety in the popular imagination, germs were viewed as ubiquitous, uncontrollable, and unpredictable agents of disease, death, and decay that could spread without restraint, unhampered by class or national borders. With its dependency on mass production and large numbers of people congregating in cities, towns, and factories, the same Industrial Revolution that fostered the discovery of germ pathology through its promotion of science, investigative medicine, and technology ironically also created the perfect conditions for successive waves of epidemics. Pasteur and Koch, and before them, John Snow, had all demonstrated how dirty water, overcrowded conditions, and filth formed the breeding ground for epidemic disease and how proper sanitation could improve the living conditions of the poor. By the end of the century, increased public awareness and widespread anxiety over contagion and disease led to not only social reform but also governments taking on responsibility for public health and legislating policies that could prevent or at least contain epidemic contagion. As the public debate grew and international congresses on medicine and health proliferated, medical discourse and social policy became more and more entwined and research on infection and disease was increasingly tied to class difference, decadence, and social decline. New disciplines in the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology considered all illness, whether mental or physical, inherited or infected, as inter-related and linked to social conditions. Nervous disorders were thought to be caused by the overstimulation of modern life; hysteria understood as an excessive disorder often assigned to women whose emotional state did not conform with social roles; criminal acts and degeneracy, emblematic of social decline common to alcoholics, artists, and writers, became by the end of the century, a distinctive feature of the working classes and along with hysteria, an essential characteristic of the modern crowd. As these theories gained influence, they, in turn, led to the development of social policies and laws that in Belgium governed everything from crime to public health and sanitation. Like many of his contemporaries, Ensor was both aware of and intrigued by this public discourse on contagion. No doubt he learned about current scientific theories and the ties between micro-organisms and disease through the Rousseaus, whose own research interests focused on biology, electricity, and medicine. Many of the paintings, drawings, and prints Ensor made between 1889 and 1900 engage the discourse of contagion, often through the inclusion of scatological elements such as pissing, farting, and defecation and the more visible signs of epidemic contagion like vomiting, bleeding, spewing, and oozing noses, odoriferous bodies, crying eyes, and perspiring brows. Etchings like Iston, Pouffmatus, Cracozie and Transmouff, Famous Persian Physicians, Examining the Stool of King Darius after the Battle of Arbela of

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1886 (T.6), and Doctrinaire Nourishment are quite direct in their reference to body excretions while paintings from the late 1880s, such as Tribulations of St. Anthony and the Fall of the Rebel Angels, are filled with tactile, viscous passages of paint whose raw color suggests bile and body waste. All manner of microscopic organisms can also be found in Ensor’s drawings from this period. Some of these details resemble malformed and degenerate creatures or allude to biological mutation and grotesque couplings like those that populate the upper panels of the Temptation of St. Anthony, or invade the etched spaces of The Infernal Cortege (1886–87) (T.10), Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels (1888)(T. 24), Small Bizarre Figures (1888) (T.53), and his later series The Seven Capital Sins (published by Van Campenhout as an album in 1904). Ensor’s 1887 etching, The Pisser (figure  1.11) and The Scavenger (T.106, E. 108), made nearly a decade later, personify Ensor’s scatological perspective. In The Pisser, a disguised self-portrait, the artist cast himself as a down-and-out member of the middle class—a social miscreant who furtively urinates against a graffiti-marked wall. In The Scavenger, Ensor depicts another sort of tramp, an unsavory-looking man with baggy clothes, peeling skin, and a mangy beard who wears a jaunty top hat. Looking over his shoulder with a smile, this humble, marginal man collecting garbage and manure, holds up something slimy for our examination. Although his job might place him at the bottom of the social ladder, this scavenger maintains a certain presence that acknowledges with pride his own productivity. In this age of capitalism, this foraging figure could indeed be Belgium’s newest entrepreneur as the collecting and selling excrement, the waste product mostly of the middle and upper classes, had become by the end of the century a profitable business venture. The Pisser’s scatological, antisocial behavior, on the other hand, is represented as an affront to public decency—an aspect reinforced by the two crudely drawn caricatures of pipe-smoking men on the wall who find their authority unceremoniously debunked. With the graffiti on the wall declaring “Ensor is a fool” the artist marks out his territory as not only marginal, but also natural, foolish, and socially beneficial. Ensor also deploys scatological signifiers of disease to lampoon middle-class anxiety over not just health but also social contagion. The couples seated on a bench in Ensor’s 1888 drawing Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around! (Plate 23) and 1904 etching (T. 127, E. 132) appear oblivious to their polluted surroundings as they take in the sea air. Ensor’s source for this drawing is a photograph taken inside a pub of Ensor, Ernest Rousseau, Willy Finch, Mariette Rousseau, the artist’s sister Mitche, and the Italian physicist Antonio Roiti, during a trip to Bruges. In Ensor’s drawing, the scene has been moved outdoors to the seaside and the artist and Professor Roiti have been eliminated from the scene and the other figures rearranged. With their fashionable clothing and proper poses, the seated group at the center defines middle-class propriety, their clothing and posture an evident contrast to the tattered and patched garments, bare feet, and informal poses of the fishermen and woman on either side. All manner of germs, flies, odors, and dirt emanate from the mouths, noses, clothing, and bodies of these poor, working-class people, clearly aligning them with current perceptions of contagion. Indeed, despite the presence of the sun and sea, associated with health and cleanliness, generally unsanitary conditions abound. Dirty footprints, puddles of urine, and even a smelly pile of feces under the bench

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provide pathological evidence of contamination. Perhaps it is this generally unhealthy atmosphere that causes the sun to vomit and proclaim the words of the title that run banner-like across the top of the drawing: “Plague above, plague below, plague all around!”.29 Underscoring Ensor’s contrary perspective, this legend, with its insinuation of ubiquitous contamination, succinctly captures contemporary anxieties surrounding contagion and disease, especially after successive epidemics throughout the century of cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague. Although the bourgeoisie on the bench seem oblivious to the generally unsanitary conditions of their location and the very near proximity of the filthy and smelly lower-class fisherfolk, they are also neither immune to disease nor without responsibility. As Ensor makes clear, the middle class also contaminates and spread disease as the centrally seated man wearing a top hat (Finch) coughs into his female companion’s ear. Given that both groups share the unhealthy sun and the polluted air rising in bilious clouds around them, one cannot help but wonder who here is infected, who might be the source of the blight, and who is spreading disease? Like The Gendarmes, The Wise Judges, and Dangerous Cooks, Ensor’s 1892 painting The Bad Doctors (Figure 3.18) was made on a small prepared panel that allowed him to work quickly and, as these other works, create a stage-like interior space.30 Like Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around!, Ensor once again utilizes the burlesque

Figure  3.18 James Ensor, The Bad Doctors, 1892, oil on panel, 50 × 61 cm, Brussels, Collection de l’Université libre de Bruxelles (photo: Vincent Everarts Photographie)

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language of parody, humor, and grotesque exaggeration to critique social anxieties about disease and modern medicine. The Bad Doctors depicts a botched stomach operation—a risky procedure at a time when surgical practices of this sort were still experimental and often deadly—that has gone very badly. A patient, intestines pouring out of a bloated stomach, cries out in pain, while the five doctors, entangled in the patient’s intestines, argue and fight among themselves. Even though the doctors are rendered with mask-like features, they are recognizable portraits of the real doctors Jules-Adrien Thiriar (1846–1913), a prominent surgeon; Guillaume Rommelaere (1836–1916), a pathologist specializing in urine analysis; Jean-Joseph Crocq (1824– 1898), who played an important role in the cholera epidemics of 1850, 1866, and 1892; Emile Yseux (1835–1915), who taught at courses in zoology, geography, paleontology, and comparative physiognomy at the Free University; and Joseph Sacré(1829–1915), a noted professor of anatomy who taught dissection. Dr. Rommelaere and Dr, Crocq were specialists in contagion and their research as well as that of Dr. Paul Vandervelde, then head of medicine at the Hospital Saint-Jean and also a professor at the Free University aided with a cholera epidemic that broke out in Antwerp and Brussels around the time Ensor was working on this painting. While representing different research and treatment on epidemics, infection, hygiene, and surgical technique, the five doctors on the painting’s stage struggle and battle against one another in a burlesque spoof of contemporary medical practice. Dressed in black and wearing top hats, cholera specialists Dr. Crocq and Dr. Rommelaere face-off, their bodies pitted against one another in disagreement. Dr. Rommelaere holds a syringe, his favored enema treatment, and Dr. Crocq brandishes a chamber pot associated with his focus on public hygiene. The bloody garments worn by the caricatured Dr. Thiriar, known for his use of antiseptics and swift surgical technique, raises a knife with entrails on it, an allusion no doubt to the “butcherous” nature of modern surgical practice, even as he appears to be holding Rommelaere and his syringe back from striking Dr. Crocq. On the other side, Dr. Sacré, also a surgeon specializing in dissection and anatomy, seems to be taking a book from Dr. Crocq’s pocket, perhaps signifying the source of his ideas. Dr. Yseux, the youngest of the doctors and a hygiene specialist interested in Darwin and Lamarck’s theories of evolution, holds his hands up as if trying to stop the battle or, as his pose mimics the patient’s, he could also be raising the alarm about the patient’s distress. Underscoring the absurdity of the scene, on the left, Death, holding a scythe lifts his bony arm as if to interrupt the action while a figure in a window stops a clock holding up time and another figure shoots a syringe as if it was a rifle, striking Dr.  Crocq. Caught up in their arguments, all the doctors ignore the patient on the couch even as intestines and the danger of infection from the bungled surgery entwines them (an entrapment more evident in the etching Ensor made of this painting some three years later (T.97, E.99)). Adding an aspect of gritty verisimilitude to what might otherwise read as slapstick farce, Ensor scattered remnants of this barbaric-looking surgical procedure in the foreground including a saw, a corkscrew, and a basket of intestinal entrails. While the doctors fight, their disagreements and possible negligence lead to the fatal outcome found in the surgeon’s ledger on the floor in the foreground: “Woman

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C expired 7 o’clock/ 1000 francs received/ Dispatch Z nothing received/ I left the sponge in the stomach. Peritonitis broke out.” As the tattered curtain pulled back reminds us, Ensor’s purpose here is allegorical and satirical. The Bad Doctors offers the beholder a theatrical yet mordant double-entendre that no doubt appealed to its owner, Dr. Vandervelde, who purchased the painting at the 1893 Les XX salon. That same year Dr. Vandervelde published with professor L.Stiénon, his findings on the epidemic: Recherches anatomo-pathologiques sur l’épidémie de le choléra de 1892 à la hôpital Saint-Jean (Brussels, Henri Lamertin, 1893). The painting returns to the mocking satires of doctors and medicine popularized by Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and Honoré Daumier. Hogarth’s 1751 engraving The Reward of Cruelty part of his set of four engravings of The Four Stages of Cruelty comes to mind. Hogarth’s print depicts the dissection of the body of Tom Nero who had been convicted and executed for animal cruelty, a crime that Ensor would also condemn in his later works on vivisection. Hogarth’s engraving, based on earlier depictions of public anatomies and autopsies, emphasizes, as does Ensor, the doctor’s insensitive treatment and like Ensor’s later print, draws from contemporary practice and topical events. Comparing Nero’s mistreatment of a bird in the first plate of The Four Stages of Cruelty with the doctor’s crude cutting and gouging, Hogarth satirizes incompetent “quackery” and the cruelty of both criminals and doctors. Ensor’s Bad Doctors probably had Hogarth’s print in mind when he similarly used the patient’s intestines as a compositional device (especially in the later print) that entraps the doctors who fight among themselves. But while Hogarth’s print presents the dismemberment and even a dog at the bottom of the print eating the man’s heart as a just reward for Nero’s mistreatment of animals, Ensor portrays the doctors as ignoring the patient who sits on a couch, innards flowing out, as Death awaits. In Ensor’s depiction, the abuse of power and medical incompetence threatens individual well-being, linking this satire to contemporary medical-social discourse. For Ensor, disease and infection are everywhere with bad doctors but one more perverse symptom of social malaise. In other work, Ensor continues to represent doctors as inept, but as his etching The Old . . . Rascals (1895 (T. 101, E. 104)) makes clear, their behavior is neither deadly nor criminal, but rather incompetent. Indeed, this print, also titled The Doctor’s Visit, describes a group of doctors, separated by a nurse about to examine three young nude women prostitutes. Public health laws intended on controlling the spread of venereal disease required doctors to check prostitutes for infection but in Ensor’s print, the doctors, again dressed in long coats and top hats denoting their middle-class status, look on rather lustfully. As the women stand ready for examination, their relaxed postures available for both our and the doctor’s voyeuristic appraisal, a skeleton enters from the side, an acerbic reminder of the hygienic purpose of the doctor’s visit. Like the later Bad Doctors, The Assassination (Figure  3.19) also describes an operation, once again combined with a scene of dismemberment like that of his painting The Wise Judges of the following year. The grisly subject and bloody, gruesome imagery can be linked to contemporary literature and medical theories as well as Ensor’s ongoing social satire and critique. The painting is based in part on Poe’s mesmeric parable The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, where a man, hoping to evade death, is hypnotized

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Figure  3.19  James Ensor, The Assassination, 1890, oil on canvas, 60.48 × 77.15 cm, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art: Gift of Howard D. and Babette L. Sirak, the Donors to the Campaign for Enduring Excellence, and the Derby Fund (photo: Columbus Museum of Art)

and remains in a trance-like state for seven months only to be brought back to life, then promptly die, and decompose. Ensor’s first treatment, an 1888 etching (T  38) derived from depictions of autopsies in contemporary illustrated journals, remains close to its literary source as well as Alphonse Legros’s 1861 illustration of Poe’s story that shows the moment after the victim on the table has lost his heart and blood flows from his body to a bowl on the floor. Ensor’s etching presents just such a moment of macabre theater that audiences familiar with mesmerism (and Poe’s stories) would have recognized. As a group looking more like actors wearing costumes and large hats with feathers than doctors proceed with their questionable operation, the man on the table awakens, aspects accented in Ensor’s hand-colored versions of the print. By the mid-nineteenth century, Franz Mesmer’s theories of “magnetic healing” and hypnotic trance cures, considered an unlicensed and unprofessional medical practice associated with spiritualism and mediums, had become well known, due in part to his theatrically staged demonstrations held at large public venues. With its tilted proscenium and backdrop suggesting a stage as well as a surgical amphitheater, Ensor’s painted version of The Assassination alludes to the performative staging of Mesmer’s treatments as well as his own contrary rendering of such practices. In the windows above the stage, various exaggerated or masked figures wearing the hats of

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their professions as soldiers, doctors, or lawyers look in on the scene. On the right, a skeleton, grinning at the audience as he plays a cracked drum and cymbals, adds musical accompaniment while on the other side a masked clown plays the flute. At the center, three masked carnival performers, one with snot dripping from his nose, hold the patient/man down as a fourth cuts out his heart. While bloody smears and fingerprints on the floor provide morbid evidence of a fierce struggle, Ensor presents the scene as a burlesque theatrical farce, one that juxtaposes the mesmeric trance of Poe’s story with the unsanitary and barbaric methods of modern surgery. Like contemporary naturalist novels, sensationalist tabloids, and Poe’s writings that fueled the Victorian imagination for the macabre and gruesome depictions of death, The Assassination immerses its audience in the horrific and absurd, as Ensor combines visceral images of barbaric surgical practice with a fantastic narrative that satirizes contemporary views on healing, medicine, and death. Ensor reprises some of these themes, albeit not with the grotesque intensity of The Assassination, in his later works against vivisection. In the nineteenth century, vivisection—surgery performed on live animals for physiological or pathological purposes—was justified as necessary and within the strict scientific protocol for research on humans, especially in the study of the nervous system, even though this medical procedure was still exploratory and very experimental. Just as Ensor looks with skepticism on surgery and infection in The Bad Doctors, in The Vile Vivisectors (1925, Belgium, Private collection) and a 1930 copy (Belgium, Private collection) he once again questions the professionalism of modern medical practices by including the markers of contagion (spitting and defecating), along with masks, costumed figures and even his self-portrait. Made at a time when legislation was pending to govern medical practices related to animals, Ensor’s painting depicts a cut-open dog placed Christ-like on a cross on a circular rondo at the painting’s center. Other details including a skeleton in the left foreground putting a coin in the hand of a figure wearing a cardinal’s hat, mozzetta, rochet and cassock and several acolytes with veiled heads that associates this medical procedure with religion. In addition to making paintings and speaking about this practice, Ensor became actively involved in the anti-vivisection movement, especially the group Blue Cross of the Belgian Coast dedicated to the protection of animals that he cofounded in 1929. In these and other works, Ensor often took a humorous or sarcastic approach letting his painting practice serve as the vehicle for social critique. The ties between the Rousseau circle and The Bad Doctors discussed above provide a glimpse into the personal associations underlying his satirical view of medical practice gone awry. While making fun of doctors, this work also points to the need for protection of the individual body and professionalism in the medical practice. At the same time, Ensor’s focus on illness was also connected to his own experience. In addition to frequently including images of vomiting, defecation, and diarrhea in his imagery, Ensor’s letters, especially those written in the mid-1880s, often refer to gastrointestinal disorders suffered by himself and family members as well as his impatience, distrust of doctors, and the limits of medical practice. Even though Pasteur, Koch, and others had isolated the germs and bacilli that spread tuberculous and cholera, and provided, in the form of microbes, a visible scientifically

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verifiable explanation for disease, and despite discussions of sanitation and hygiene in the popular press and at international conferences and health fairs such as the one held in Ostend in 1888, epidemics of tuberculous and cholera continued to sweep through Belgium. While these diseases had discernible symptoms, syphilis, another equally widespread infectious disease of the nineteenth century, especially among the middle class, had less noticeable signs. Official reports and many a naturalist and symbolist novel associated these outbreaks with the crowded urban milieu and the spread of prostitution. Ocean air and sea bathing were promoted as a healthy alternative to the sick, polluted city, and spas and resorts, like those in Ostend, offered the bourgeoisie a restorative cure that, while doing little to prevent the spread of disease, allowed for an escape from the congested spaces of the city. Ensor’s 1888 drawing Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around! humorously upends bourgeois desire for leisure at a seashore untainted by pollution or the working class. Baths of Ostend (Plate 24), a mixed media work on a prepared panel made two years later, juxtaposes contemporary concerns over disease and contagion with a parody of middle-class life and the current vogue for sea bathing. Ostend, as noted earlier, had become by 1890 the “Queen of Seaside Resorts,” known internationally for its Casino and boardwalk, its spas with their restorative thermal baths, and most notably, its wide beach opening onto the North Sea, associated with both curative immersion therapy and, as Ensor makes clear, voyeuristic spectacle. This sweeping panoramic view looks upon Ostend’s western beach, developed specifically for the tourist trade, where horsedrawn bathing cabins carry bathers to the waters and where many, many bodies have plunged into the waves and bracing sea. Inviting the public to enjoy the pleasures of a day at the beach, Ensor even includes himself perched with a telescope on the roof of one of the cabins at the left. Coupling the grotesque and exaggerated conventions of caricature with an energetic arabesque line, Ensor describes beach attire and bathing hut protocol as well as the therapeutic regime of submersion in cold sea waters intended to invigorate and restore the body. As a smiling sun emerges from behind wavy clouds, assorted groups of spectators representing Belgium’s ruling elite, the bourgeois, and the military, and even a priest, who has wandered onto a rock, congregate along the shore with beach attendants and others. Attempting to maintain the social decorum of their class and gender, these onlookers voyeuristically gawk, some with binoculars and telescopes, at the often-transgressive antics of the teeming masses who bathe and frolic in the waves. Bodies of all ages and sizes, some in bathing suits, others without, many fragmented or upside down, some bug-like, with swollen bellies and exposed buttocks fill the North Sea waters to the distant, boat-filled horizon. Overwhelming the pictorial space and engaged in all manner of play and sexual coupling, Ensor’s bathers effectively pollute the sea, the excess of their curving, undulating forms in marked contrast to the rigid poses and profile views of those on the shore. The healthful benefits of Ostend’s beach might be more than the doctor prescribed as those on the beach as well as the viewer are thrust into the wayward, sexualized space of uninhibited and at times illicit pleasure and confronted by the exaggerated, excessive bodies associated at the time with degeneracy, hysteria, and madness. While restorative and therapeutic, immersion in the sea as envisioned by Ensor’s satirical representation is also subversive, offering

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up all sorts of voyeuristic and at times pornographic fantasies as an alternative prescription to the social pomposity of modern leisure. Drawn as if viewed through the lens of a microscope, the bathing masses look like teeming micro-organisms in a petri dish. But moving away from the more confrontational, political, and scatological works of the previous year, here Ensor uses humor to explore contemporary health fads and lampoon the tourists who flocked to Ostend even though these same tourists also supported the Ensor family business with their money and shopping. Even Leopold II, who spent summers at his villa in Ostend and who had been the subject of some of Ensor’s most political satire, found little offensive in this painting when he saw it. In his published essays, Ensor wrote that when Octave Maus asked that the Baths of Ostend be removed from a salon of Le Libre Esthétique stating that it was indecent, the King asked that it remain. According to Ensor, King Leopold saw the work and insisted that it be included noting: “Monsieur Ensor has done the subject very well; he has not exaggerated, this is exactly how one bathes in Ostend. The sea and bathing do sometimes hold pleasant surprises for us. Mr. Ensor, I compliment you, your drawing pleases me.”31 By 1890, references to contagion had become commonplace in the artist’s work, acting as a sarcastic and often grotesque sign of Ensor’s satiric intent. As his earlier parodies of law and medicine, At the Conservatory (Figure  3.20) is also filled with

Figure  3.20  James Ensor, At the Conservatory, 1902, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 56  ×  71.5 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Patrice Schmidt)

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allusions to infection and disease that humorously suggest Wagner’s music is spreading like an epidemic. Reprising the strategy of The Bad Doctors, Ensor includes in the painting recognizable portraits of members of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels some of whom also performed at the musical evenings at Les XX, and La Libre Esthétique. Although he references contagion, the caricatures in this work are less exaggerated and mocking than the earlier painting of the doctors: the violinist Eugène Ysaye (1858–1931) perspires profusely while the chorus spews; the singer Jeanne Flament (1882–1956) spits out her teeth as she warbles into Ida Cornélis-Servais’s ear, even as Mme. Cornélis-Servais (1855–1941), similarly infected with a bout of Wagnerism, sweats and expectorates. As snot drips from the conductor FrançoisAuguste Gevaert’s (1828–1908) nose and the singers vocalize the words written on the musical score—a parody of the Valkyrie song—in the foreground (so that the audience might sing along), the chorus in the background spreads the opera’s virus so virulently that even Richard Wagner, appearing in a frame at the center, is overwhelmed. As bouquets and other tokens of admiration (including carrots, Ensor’s symbol (a pickled herring), and a duck with a one hundred franc note) fly through the air, Wagner cries and holds his ears. Based on Ensor’s 1890 colored crayon drawing Indignant bourgeois whistling Wagner in 1880 in Brussels (Belgium, Private collection) exhibited at the 1890 Les XX Salon (no. 17) and dedicated to Léon Rinskopf (1862–1915) composer and later head of the orchestra at the Ostend Casino (and like Ensor a member of the satirical Company of the Dead Rat), At the Conservatory takes on the air of an inside joke that makes fun of Wagnermania. Unlike his work of the late 1880s where references to contagion satirize broader social anxieties, by the turn of the century, Ensor’s inclusion of signs of illness and disease became less frequent, serving mainly to signal his moralizing commentary. Images of vomiting, for example, are now more often associated with excessive behavior than contagion. In Gluttony (1904) (D124 E 129) an etching from his series The Seven Capital Sins, seemingly satiated diners throw up, even as one looks at the next meal being served by a skeleton. The meal these men are consuming, including a live chicken pie, a riven bottle of wine, and the severed head of a man might be enough to turn the stomach, but the food keeps coming, as indicated by a pig on the far right and a scene the background of more pigs being slaughtered. Meanwhile, a dog seated at the back of the central diner’s chair defecates, contributing yet one more excremental element to this foul and intemperate environment of excessive consumption. Comical Repast (The Banquet of the Starved) (c. 1917–18, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), painted ten years later during the First World War, reprises the motif of a vomiting figure and even the banquet theme of Gluttony from the Seven Deadly Sins but in this painting, a meager meal counters the moralizing depiction of sin in the earlier print. In this large-scale painting, a motley group of diners, their faces frozen in half-smiles and contorted grimaces, gather around a table to form a strange, absurdist Last Supper. In front of them lies a barely edible meal of bugs, flies, a mollusk, crab, skate, and another small fish, an onion, and two carrots. One elegantly dressed man reaches for food while next to him a harlequin wearing tricolored cockade retches, the rest of the diners are locked in a fiercely competitive

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struggle as they argue and struggle or try to strangle, kill or seduce one another. Painted during the First World War when Ostend, like the rest of Belgium, was experiencing food shortages and many were starving, the work makes its ironic point by juxtaposing the actions of the diners, including Goethe, who holds a knife and fork, with lively skeletons, who seem more alive than the diners, playing billiards in the background or ecstatically urinating on a meadow in bloom. In the center, Ensor has placed a larger version of his 1891 painting of skeletons fighting over a pickled herring, this disguised self-portrait now an apt symbol of his own resistant and resilient attitude to the world depicted below. The painting refers to Ensor’s continuing contacts with his contemporaries despite the hardship of war. The German expressionist painter Anton Kerschbaumer (1885–1931), who is seated next to the figure resembling Goethe, was a member of a German ambulance unit, which also included Eric Heckel (1883–1970), stationed in Ostend under the command of the art historian Walter Kaesbach (1879–1961). Ensor had been arrested by the occupying military authority for making a painting in the Ostend town hall depicting lancers impaling children. Kerschbaumer, Heckel, and the others learning of his arrest intervened on Ensor’s behalf and he was released. Kerschbaumer then gave Ensor three canvases on which he painted two still lifes and Banquet of the Starved on the last.32 Other works reference disease and appropriate a scientific perspective, now often joined with current events and people as well as citations from history or religion. Looking like a lantern slide projection of bacteria or a petri dish under a microscope, Roman Victory, a drawing of 1891 (Brussels, KBR, Print Cabinet, inv. S.IV 29.33 (plano C)) developed from an earlier 1889 etching (T. 78) and sketch (Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins) describes an elaborate procession of soldiers, animals, and a marching crowd set against a deep and vast landscape filled with banners, classical statues, arches, and architecture. In a letter, Ensor refers to Julius Cesar amid a huge crowd with exotic headdresses like those in the foreground of The Cathedral. The drawing, exhibited alongside Calvary, Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, and Doctrinal Nourishment at Les XX, includes several references to that group, such as their emblem on a drum at the far right and on a standard held aloft by one of the marchers, encouraging the viewer to make connections between the ancient past and the contemporary present. In addition to the broad perspective and teeming figures, Ensor once again alludes to contagion and contemporary medical practice with a line of red-clad figures who strut by with clysters and a man who spits from a tower in the background. These additions and the setting in the flat Flemish landscape near the sea as well as a not so subtle allusion to Les XX make a connection between the authoritarian rule of ancient Rome and modern Belgium, contagion, and the quest for fame and power. Similarly, Ensor’s drawings The Cuirassiers of Waterloo (1891, Antwerp KMSKA) and The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Plate 25) exhibited at Les XX in 1892, take on a broader, more historical perspective, that although drawn from history sustain nevertheless the artist’s on-going commentary on contemporary life. The Cuirassiers of Waterloo reprises strategies found in his more directly political works like The Strike, by combining multiple sheets of paper to form a broad horizontal composition. The eye

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wanders through the vast panorama and delights in the artist’s playful alliteration in line and shape in this drawing that describes the climactic battle leading to Napoleon’s defeat and the establishment of the modern Belgian state. A pulsating curvilinear line forms into smoke and clouds that along with the rhythmic repetition of the charging horses adds more decorative energy further embellishing Ensor’s satirical examination of the folly of empire and power. Ensor continues this discourse on Napoleon in several other works, even writing a detailed text about this history on the back of his 1889 drawing Napoleon’s Last Stand (The Hague, Kunstmuseum) and devoting an etching to The Adieux of Napoleon (1897) (T. 111, E. 114). Around the same time Ensor also paints a sarcastic portrait of Napoleon not as a noble emperor but rather as a defeated and contrite solider surrounded by his followers in The Remorse of the Ogre of Corsica (1890–91, Belgium, Private collection). The Battle of the Golden Spurs refers to an uprising and historical battle that took place on July 11, 1302. Following a similar compositional layout to The Baths of Ostend of the previous year, Ensor presents the Kortrijk battlefield where the conflict took place from a high bird’s eye perspective. Wielding medieval weapons, including lances, glaives, voulges, and scythes along with a few ink pens, legions of Flemish fill in the left side and foreground. As they stand at the ready under the flag of the Lion of Flanders, the multitude of figures, shields, and flags that continue back into the vast flat landscape and windmill-filled horizon are amplified by Ensor’s repetition of many tiny lines augmented by touches of red pencil. The French cavalry, carrying flags and lances and some wearing spurs, gather along the right edge and background and then charge forward with banners flying into the swampy, muddy fields that would aid in their defeat. Among the Flemish militia in the left foreground, one figure looks toward the viewer, engaging our eye to look upon and witness the dismemberment, strangulation, gouging, and violent, often sexualized assault of the French that occurs at the center of the composition. The French soldiers bleed, vomit, and defecate, their humiliation amplified by bared buttocks and fragmented body parts. Touches of gold leaf add a decorative flourish that, when combined with medieval armor, flags, and an undulating arabesque line, inserts a playful, imaginative element that joins with the high omnipresent viewpoint to distance the violence of this fierce battle despite its grotesque details. The burlesque narrative of The Battle of the Golden Spurs would have struck a chord for the mainly Francophone crowd that saw it at the 1892 Les XX salon, reminding its audience of the resiliency of the Flemish spirit and the foolish pride of the French. Ensor’s awareness in the Flemish Movement, which promoted Flemish culture and language and later advocated for political autonomy for Flanders, was already evident in 1886 when he included a placard citing the movement in his drawing of The Entry into Jerusalem and continued during the 1890s with numerous interactions with August Vermeylen, Emmanuel de Bom, Cyriel Buysse, and other writers concerned with Flemish political and linguistic rights in the Van Nu en Straks (Of Now and Tomorrow) (1893–1901) magazine. While earlier in the century, the Belgian state had used this historical episode to counter French imperialism, by the 1890s this battle served as an important marker of Flemish independence. Taking up this popular subject in

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Belgian history and giving it a satirical interpretation tinged with his ambivalent views about French influence on Belgian culture, Ensor joins past and present to portray an ironic battle between nationalism and cultural identity that resonated in present-day Belgium. Contagion, degeneracy, and alcoholism, religion and politics, art and music, past and present history, Ensor’s choice of subjects reflected his engagement with the social, cultural, and political discourses of turn of the century Belgium. References to debates so central to this period over art theory and practice, science and religion, capitalism and socialism, public health and disease, coexisted with Ensor’s unmediated, often confrontational, antagonistic, sarcastic, humorous, and, at times, visionary artwork that moved freely between drawing, painting, and printmaking. As this chapter has shown, Ensor’s sense of entitlement and social mission initially took the form of realist paintings that testified to his progressive political and artistic views. Soon, however, he created more expressive and symbolist works that joined the personal with the political. Conveyed through graphic and painterly deformation, odd juxtaposition, satiric wordplay, artifice, and disguise, with masks and puppets performing narratives laced with political commentary and social satire, the radicalized personal subjectivity of Ensor’s art practice remained intent on engaging the Belgian public with his commentary and criticism.

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A textual poem published in Paul Haesaerts’s 1959 monograph seems to reinforce a statement Ensor once wrote that he did not like women very much: Deceiving sex . . . Sink of hypocrisy . . . Mud-pit of malice Cavern of greed and the deadly sins. Pandora box . . . Liquid manure, sticky and oozing with vermin . . . The scourge of heaven and earth. Constant mask and endless smile.1

Written for and dedicated to the Ostend filmmaker Henri Storck, who had experienced disillusionment in his relationships with women, the poem could be interpreted as a fear or dislike of the liberated, “New Woman” of the 1920s (when the poem was written), although its descriptive language and word choice continues the misogynous notions of the monstrous, fatal woman commonly found in nineteenthcentury literature. While this poem and some of his artwork suggest a negative and rather conventional attitude, as with other aspects of his life, Ensor often concealed his position or self-consciously changed or shifted his response to confront the public. This chapter revisits Ensor’s representation of women to offer a new assessment, one that resists and complicates prevailing interpretations of his art practice by discussing the circumstance and ways in which these images were shaped by the artist’s experiences and interactions with women, nineteenth-century cultural attitudes on gender, and his own sexual identity. Most accounts portray Ensor as a lonely, isolated, and misunderstood artist who suffered from an oppressive female-dominated home environment and unsupportive family members. Examples from his work, like Demons Teasing Me (Figure 1.22) where his aunt is transformed into a frowning grotesque or Afternoon in Ostend (Figure 3.1) with its image of the artist’s aloof mother, are often cited to reinforce this perspective. These narratives of the artist’s frustration and family strife have dominated the interpretation of Ensor’s art practice since his death, inspiring, for example, Piron’s psychoanalytic analysis that attributes Ensor’s anxiety and diminished creativity after

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1900 to his inability to become a father or earn a living from his work resulting in a loss of virility and a castration complex.2 Discussions of Ensor’s relationships with women conform to heteronormative conventions of physical attraction, sexual desire, and marriage. For some scholars, Ensor’s depictions of Madame Rousseau represent the artist’s repressed and unrequited love for a married woman. A similar view describes his relationship with Augusta Boogaerts as life-long and intimate, with the two never marrying due to social status and family disapproval. Friendships with Emma Lambotte, Claude Bernières, and Blanche Hertoge are portrayed as supportive with Ensor at times assuming the role of the master artist to his adoring muses. While these non-romantic liaisons certainly sustained Ensor, especially in terms of patronage, they also allied his public identity with societal norms of masculinity even as he set himself apart from these gendered conventions and social attitudes, performing his difference through cross-dressing, posing as an inscrutable dandy, or adding feminine accessories such as flowers and feathers to some of his self-portraits. While these self-portraits invite speculation as to the nature of Ensor’s sexuality, his depictions of often violent sexual acts and behavior against women sustain a more negative reading that seems to support the misogynist tone of the text cited above. As this chapter will discuss, Ensor’s images of women are both nuanced and complex, especially when examined from the perspective of his life, social circumstance, and modern experience. He can be quite sympathetic to the domestic lives of middle-class women, especially as experienced by his immediate family and close friends, offering through his paintings and drawings a perceptive view of the social conditions and status of women in the fin-de-siècle. At other times, his representations reflect his engagement with contemporary discourse, including the sacred and profane dialectic so prominent in nineteenth-century art, Impressionist and Symbolist artistic theory, and literary notions of the ideal. Ensor can pay homage to the virginal Mary, for example, portraying her as a divine mother who nurtures and consoles the artist. At the same time his numerous depictions of masked, grotesque, and, at times, sadistic women, or his sarcastic and often rude caricatures such as his portrayal of the revolutionary Marianne adopt more negative stereotypes. While some work points to his sensitivity to women’s experience, his infrequent representation of the female nude suggests that his interaction with women was mainly social and rarely intimate. Indeed, during his long career, Ensor makes only a few drawings of the nude from life. Most of his large-scale images of male nudes are academic drawings after plaster casts of sculptures while the source material for his female nudes can be linked to pornographic prints and photographs. But whether drawn from life or lifted from popular imagery, many of Ensor’s awkwardly rendered female nudes are associated with temptation and sadistic torture. These overlapping and contradictory narratives invite further inquiry into how these images interact with both the artist’s contemporary experience and nineteenth-century attitudes toward women. Examination of “Ensor’s women” in relation to the artist’s creativity and the role of gender and Ensor’s sexuality can offer a broader and more nuanced understanding of the artist and his practice.

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At Home Between 1880 and 1881, Ensor painted fifteen works depicting women in interiors as their primary subject. Some of the works from this group of early paintings, the so-called “intimate” interiors discussed in Chapter 3, are situated in the Ensor family salon, where singular or multiple figures—the artist’s sister, aunt, and mother—are observed from a discreet distance as they are engaged in mundane everyday activities such as reading, sewing, or drinking tea. The exception, Russian Music, takes place in another setting, possibly the Rousseau family salon in Brussels and is the only painting from this series where a man and a woman are seen together. These interiors exploring the decorum and experience of middle-class life were among the first paintings Ensor exhibited publicly, underscoring their importance in establishing his reputation as a painter of modern Belgian life. A number of these paintings, like Women with a Red Shawl (1880, Belgium, Private collection), appear to be studies in a similar vein to his contemporaneous drawings of dockworkers and domestics where individual sitters are placed in familiar settings. Others can be linked to the current trend of fashionable portraiture, including Lady with a Red Parasol (1880, Antwerp, KMSKA) and Lady with a Fan (1880, Antwerp, KMSKA). Several focus attention on singular women, either close-up or set back in the middle ground, where they sleep, as in The Convalescent (1880–81, Itami, Itami City Museum); are in bed as The Lady in Distress, knitting like The Lady in Grey (1881, Brussels, RMFAB); seated lost in thought (The Somber Lady, 1881. Brussels, RMFAB) or by a table (Waiting, 1882, Antwerp, KMSKA). Except for A Colorist, where Ensor’s sister Mitche sits in a corner of the artist’s studio painting a fan, the smaller version of the Bourgeois Salon (1880, Antwerp, Private collection) where she peers out from the murkiness of the living room, and The Oyster Eater where she enjoys a meal of oysters, all of the women Ensor portrayed in these interior spaces are preoccupied with daily tasks, seemingly unaware of the viewer’s gaze. The paintings with more active women were also among the works Ensor first exhibited: A Colorist was shown at La Chysalide in 1881, the Paris Salon of 1882, and the first Les XX salon in 1884. He sent The Oyster Eater under its original title In the Land of Colors to the 1882 Antwerp salon, where it was refused, and to the 1883 L’Essor salon where it was also refused. For Ensor, these representations of women and interiors were significant enough that he persisted in exhibiting them even after they were rejected. Whether as part of a group or as individuals, all of these women are associated with their surroundings, their status and identity wedded to the indoors and the home, as Camille Lemonnier noted in his description of Afternoon in Ostend: Ensor, who had made a vague impression in certain salons, suddenly set about disturbing optical perceptions in Afternoon in Ostend: a young woman on a visit in a grey-blue apartment, of a cigarette smoke blue whose shadows scarcely allow us to glimpse another female figure, sitting down against the light: both ladies moreover, calm, considered, almost serious, before a fireplace with decoration in brass. A strong accuracy of vision emanated from this work suggestive of silences

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in the home, the pleasures of chat, the easy relaxation of mutual abandon, in the peace of a closed room in which the blue-ish daylight filtering in through the curtains from outside seemed to emit a fine dusting of brightness.3

Complimenting Ensor on his ability to render ambiance and atmospheric effect, Lemmonier overlooks the tension and emotional distance between the sitters, as well as exchange of looks between the younger female visitor and the artist that hint at unspoken narratives and rituals of decorum in this bourgeois salon. Instead, Lemmonier’s description reaffirms the notion of separate spheres and the late nineteenth-century association of women with quiet salons and small talk. Yet even if this painting’s subject is topical, Ensor’s view of domestic life is complex, often empathetic and at times ambivalent, providing a glimpse into emotional and psychological aspects of women’s experiences within the private spaces of the home. The encapsulating warmth and nurturing environment of the home was viewed in the nineteenth century as protective of family values with the everyday life of the middle-class women centered on raising children and maintaining the home. While such attitudes found reflection in paintings of women in domestic settings, the actual circumstance of women’s lives was hardly represented and far less visible. As their contemporaries in other countries, Belgian women, their presence and identity carefully circumscribed by the protocols of class and gender, were kept outside the spheres of power in politics, education, and work. Men without property, in other words, working-class and middle-class men (except for those who paid enough taxes) may have gained the right to vote by 1890 due to the efforts of the BWP, but Belgian women of any class would not obtain this right until 1920. Education, essential for improving women’s status and access to power, was also limited. By the 1870s, the Liberal Party’s education reforms made it possible for a middle-class woman to receive a basic education, but advanced study was more difficult as Belgian universities were slow in admitting women. The Free University accepted its first women students only in 1880 followed by the University of Liège in 1881 and Ghent in 1882. Even with this access, many women still found it difficult to finish their university education and when they did earn a degree, to begin a practice, especially medicine or law. Marie Popelin (1846–1913) provides a good example of the middle-class woman’s dilemma. In 1888 she became the first Belgian woman to complete her law studies. Refused admission to the bar, Popelin had to work as a court clerk while her unsuccessful appeals made their way through the Belgian courts and as the widely reported “Popelin Affair” made clear, a university education and even completion of degrees were not enough to guarantee a woman access to a profession. It would not be until 1920 that, in addition to gaining the right to vote, women were able to hold a political office and only in 1922 were women accepted as lawyers at court. Access to an arts education was equally limited. As with other professions, women could receive artistic instruction in private studios or schools but were not admitted to the Brussels or Antwerp academies, where they might have access to life drawing from the nude or be considered for awards and honors, until 1888. As in France, Belgian women artists were encouraged to work in pastel and watercolor or to make portraits; artistic pursuits deemed more suitable for women. Exhibiting at the triannual Salon

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was possible but very few women were accepted. Interestingly, it would be independent artist exhibition societies like Les XX that admitted women as members (Anna Boch in 1886) and invited them to exhibit with the group, notably the French Impressionists Berthe Morisot in 1887, Jeanne Gonzalès in 1888, and the American painter Mary Cassatt in 1892.4 Although unable to have a bank account, sign an employment contract, or earn a salary in their own name until 1910, women nevertheless played an essential role in Belgium’s economy. Working-class women and children could be found in every sector of Belgian industry from the mines and textile mills to agriculture and lacemaking. Toiling twelve to fourteen hours daily in factories and fields or at home, women received such low wages that they often enlisted their children to help support the family. After government inquiries into working conditions from the 1840s to  the 1860s and the 1886 strikes, laws were passed at the end of the century limiting the hours that women and their children could work. As a way to provide new areas of employment for the daughters and wives of workers that would at the same time keep them safely indoors away from prostitution and homelessness, social reformers (often upper-class women) set up schools and institutes to educate women in the “domestic arts.” Working and lower-middle-class women and girls, like the young girl depicted by Ensor in an 1880 drawing (“La Mousse,” Belgium, Private collection) and another wearing a red shawl in his painting Woman with Red Shawl, were similar to those recruited from the streets, mines, and factories for training at schools like the Higher Institute for Young Ladies (founded by Léonie de Waha de Chestret) in Liège to become domestic servants and maids, cooks, and dressmakers. Domestic work was viewed by these reformers as a solution for social unrest as it removed lower-class women from the workplace, returning them to the home and their “natural” roles as wives and mothers, thus restoring traditional family values. Of course, domestics were paid even less than women working in industrial factories or mines, but their cheap labor serviced the larger homes of the upper-middle class. Even a petite bourgeoisie household like Ensor’s employed domestic workers who provided inexpensive labor cleaning the home and attending the shop, as was perhaps the occupation of the Seated Young Woman who posed for Ensor. In late nineteenth-century Belgium, working in the home was often not considered work and, as such, not registered as an occupation. Domestic labor, poorly compensated and even less visible, formed a hidden economy that reinforced patriarchal assumptions about women’s status both in society and in the home. Yet while many women were limited in their employment prospects and education, one place where women from the petit-bourgeois class could work without social approbation was in shops, like the Ensor family’s souvenir store, boutiques, and the department stores that flourished during this period. Even though, like their sisters in other areas of the labor market, shopkeepers worked long hours, usually fifteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, they often had economic independence and more job stability. Yet even though they dominated their profession—shop workers were generally assumed to be female—work in the store or boutique was understood to be a natural extension of women’s domestic role, intimately tied to the home and the woman’s position as wife and mother. Although small shops were

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generally understood to be a feminine domain, under the Civil Code, women, even if responsible for running the shop, were viewed as assistants and not listed in the statistics or on the tax rolls. While hardly participating in commercial activities and rarely seen working in these mercantile spaces, husbands were considered the legal owners who held the lease, paid the taxes, and represented the enterprise at professional organizations. Retail was one of the occupations open to widows like Ensor’s mother, who became more visible economically and socially as they began to be recognized under the Civil Code and tax laws. But the notion that women only began working or took over after their husbands died once again misrepresents the actuality of these women’s lives. Not only did Marie Louise Catherine Haegheman Ensor work in the souvenir-curio shop along with her daughter, Mitche and sometimes her son, James, but so did her sister, Marie (Aunt Mimi) Ludovica Haegheman, who supervised or was in charge of many of the family businesses. Mme. Ensor was herself the daughter of a tradesman and more than likely worked in the family enterprise as a young woman along with her siblings. Moreover, as the family bankruptcy makes clear, Ensor’s father, James Frederic had little involvement or interest in the shop despite his status as owner. James’s ambivalence toward the long hours of hidden labor by the Ensor women to maintain both their economic status and (indirectly) his studio practice can be seen in his drawings of these women resting, sewing, and slumbering sometimes with exaggerated or exhausted facial expressions. The provocative blend of sympathetic identification and antagonism in these works describes both Ensor’s daily life and the lived experiences of these petit-bourgeois women and the domestic interiors where they spent their lives when not working. Yet even if Ensor vacillated in his involvement with the family business, his decision to exhibit paintings of domestic interiors in official Salons in Belgium and France as well as Les XX nonetheless lends value and significance to these less represented spaces and the feminine perspective they embody.

Women Waiting For the Impressionists, particularly Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, the domestic interior with its spaces of intimacy, privacy, and contemplation provided a modern subject worthy of artistic exploration. Like Morisot and Cassatt, Ensor’s early paintings of women in interiors investigated the expressive potential of women’s experience through images of private indoor moments of daily life. Yet while sharing similarities with his contemporaries, Ensor’s images of women remain quite different. Most if not all of Ensor’s early paintings depict petite bourgeois women dressed in contemporary but plain clothing with few accessories, their poses, and unpretentious settings an invitation to appreciate both the women’s social status and respectability. Often avoiding the observer’s gaze and without ostentatious display, Ensor’s women as depicted in his paintings serve less as vehicles to celebrate commodity and current fashion than as the occasion for the artist’s exploration of a realist/impressionist subject in the light and color of the interior.

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Like Ensor, fellow Belgian Alfred Stevens (1823–1906) drew inspiration from the Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting where women were often viewed within domestic interiors. Stevens’ subject, however, is the Parisian woman, who served the artist as a pretext for presentation of a spectacular display of technique and facility meant to dazzle his patrons and admirers with sensuous descriptions of beautiful things. His paintings of young bourgeois women, dressed in the latest styles and posed indoors in opulent settings, sustain a nineteenth-century feminine ideal allied with fashion, shopping, and entertaining within a commodity culture built on possession and desire. Described by Danielle Derrey-Capon as “the impassive, fake society lady in an authentically luxurious setting. This is a woman who waits and contemplates: silent and surrounded by inactivity. She is an allusion of the woman ‘comme il faut,’ cleverly constructed taking as its model, women ‘as we need them to be’”.5 Unlike Ensor’s women in lived environments, Stevens’s women are presented as all surface and little complexity, but one more desirable object, the perfect accessory for the bourgeois man. Indeed, Stevens’s models appear to acknowledge their part in the spectacle with poses that anticipate and at times connect with the observer’s gaze: they look away as if lost in thought or are caught in a private moment of reading as they regard their reflection in a mirror or turn and glance outward. Stevens’s Young Woman and Japanese Screen c. 1880 (Figure 4.1) combines many of these aspects. Here a woman wearing a soft pink dress with a low neckline and fitted bodice accented at the waist by satin and silk bows sits in front of a fashionable Japanese folding screen in close, even intimate proximity to the observer, her elbow leaning casually on a table. The model’s informal attitude continues in the forward tilt of her head, her loose hair, parted lips, and eyes that gaze outward and to the right, as well as in the soft light that lingers with sensuous delight on the dress, lending an alluring, seductive immediacy to the scene. Ensor’s Lady with a Fan (Figure  4.2) of the same year also depicts a woman, modeled by the artist’s sister Mitche, in an indoor setting, probably the artist’s studio. But instead of pushing toward the viewer’s space, Ensor’s figure is situated in the middle ground, and, rather than sitting coyly in a chair, she stands behind one, her eyes trained on the artist and the viewer, her lips closed and unsmiling. Like Stevens, Ensor’s painting is a study in light and color harmonies, and similarly, his model hints at fashionable modernity by holding a large open fan in front of her. But the differences between the two are also quite striking. Ensor’s model wears a long skirt and a double-breasted jacket with a row of buttons that accent a slender profile topped by a wide lace collar. This sensible and modest ensemble allows for a play of greys, whites, and blacks that acknowledges Ensor’s interest in Édouard Manet’s work while also showing off his skillful technique and subtle use of tonal color. Mitche’s somewhat reticent pose behind the chair disguises any awkwardness Ensor may have had in rendering the figure while placing the model at a respectful distance. Thus, while each painting includes the exchange of glances and delights in tactile materiality, Stevens’s model offers the illusion of possession while Ensor’s model is just that, a young woman who poses but whose composure, costume, and regard deflects any implication of desire or acquisition.

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 4.1  Alfred Stevens, Young Woman and Japanese Screen, c. 1880, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 51.8 cm, Louisville, Kentucky, Collection of the Speed Art Museum Gift of the Charter Collectors and Mr. and Mrs. Jouett Ross Todd, by exchange, 1989.11.2 (© Speed Art Museum, photo: courtesy Speed Art Museum)

­Figure 4.2  James Ensor, Lady with a Fan, 1880, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 132.5 × 83 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

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James Whistler’s paintings share Stevens’s penchant for fashion and go even further in linking women to the interior and the decorative. His Harmony in Grey and Green: no.3: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872–74, London: Tate) exhibited at Les XX in 1884 when Whistler showed with the group for the first time, depicts a rather rigidly posed eightyear-old girl, dressed in a white muslin dress with a grey ruffle and yellow bow and holding a grey hat with a yellow feather, standing against a plain grey and black setting. Whistler’s painting is also a portrait, but the viewer learns little about this girl other than her youth and upper-class status. With a palette restricted to black, white, and ochre, this thinly painted figure, even after its painted surface having been obsessively scrapped away and built up by Whistler in over seventy sittings, forms a carefully contrived arrangement indebted to Velázquez and Japanese art. Whistler’s presence is made clear in the fluttering butterflies and signature emblem on the back wall with the girl, despite the exchange of glances, another element in the decorative arrangement that, like other paintings in Whistler’s harmony-titled series of paintings, accents compositional and tonal consonance. Ensor’s Lady with a Fan also works with a limited palette and the model stands within the careful geometry of the composition, but her presence is neither decorative nor confined. Indeed, rather than fit an aestheticized pattern like a Whistler portrait, or serve as one of Stevens’s beautiful accessories, Ensor’s singular women animate the interiors they occupy imbuing these spaces with narrative and, at times, psychological perspective. As Lady with a Fan, the models for Women with Red Shawl and Lady with a Red Parasol (also titled Lady in Red), all pose within a generalized interior setting (perhaps the artist’s studio) at a distance from the viewer. Whether seated or standing, they either look back toward the painter or else off to the side, with the stiff postures found in contemporary portrait photography or fashion journals. Focusing attention on a centralized figure, these paintings, as Ensor’s other work from the early 1880s, accent color and form over descriptive detail. Clothing and accessories are simplified into broadly brushed areas of color—the red of a shawl, umbrella, or jacket set against a blue skirt and muted grey background, a simple daytime ensemble of white, grey, and blue offset by a green fan—that evidence the artist’s engagement with both current color theory and modern fashion. Other paintings portray women occupied with their tasks, waiting, or even in bed. The woman painting fans in A Colorist (Plate 2) is viewed in profile looking down as she paints. The light streaming in through the back window creates a contre-jour effect, gently modeling her dress in a soft warm yellow light and complimentary blue shadow. Shown in a similar arrangement, that is seated, but now from a three-quarter view and intently knitting, The Lady in Grey, dressed in a full-length day dress, is placed in a corner of a parlor between two windows. Sunlight streams in, enveloping the woman and her surroundings in a harmonic blend of blues and greens offset at the center by the bright red garment (a sock?) that she is knitting. The Somber Lady (Figure  4.3) also set in a corner near two windows uses a similar compositional arrangement for a completely different effect. Now wearing a hat and one glove, dressed in black as if just returned from the outdoors, the woman sits to one side, her umbrella leaning against a divan. Placed in front of a curtained window, the woman with her dark silhouette, modest pose, and downward gaze suggests an introverted or somber, reflective state.

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 4.3  James Ensor, The Somber Lady, 1881, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography)

Exploring the compositional and expressive potential of color, Ensor sets the cool tones of the interior against the warm yellow of the window that, when combined with the diagonal placement of the blue rug and bright red umbrella, constructs a convincing space and meditative mood for this interior view. Like Morisot and Cassatt, Ensor’s paintings of interiors dwell on the activities and social decorum of the home and the familiar, using often intimate details of domestic life to explore with an impressionist palette the color, light, and atmosphere of the interior. Morisot’s model in Daydreaming (1877, Kansas City, Missouri, Atkins Museum of Art) and Ensor’s Lady with a Fan both wear fashionable yet modest clothing and hold fans, their casual, informal poses an acknowledgment of their social status and comfort in an indoor setting. Unlike the elaborate dresses worn by Stevens and Whistler’s models, Morisot’s young lady sits on a couch in a loose day dress, her pose both provocative and completely at ease. Ensor’s woman wears a fitted jacket with a broad lace collar and a more formal long skirt. While her posture seems a bit stiff, Mitche holds an open fan, an accessory linked to women’s social role that in this interior setting establishes a connection with the viewer. Both Ensor and Morisot draw attention to the ambiance of these interior spaces, carefully and sensitively exploring the luminous or shadowy rooms with energetic brushstrokes (and in Ensor’s case, the palette knife) that model each figure while highlighting their modesty and propriety. Although these young women remain indoors in the salon or studio, they are not hidden away. Rather, both women directly engage the viewer’s eye, inviting,

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through this exchange of glances, a dialogue between these interior spaces and the world beyond the pictorial frame. Ensor’s A Colorist (Plate 2) uses a similar pictorial device as Lady with a Fan to describe a quite different experience. Like Morisot’s young lady in Daydreaming, Ensor’s figure sits near a window but rather than Morisot’s more intimate close-up view, this woman (Mitche) is seen in profile further back in the interior. Although Ensor’s model also holds a fan, she is seemingly unaware of the observer’s gaze as she looks down, totally engaged with her work of painting the fan. Rather than Morisot’s woman or a model holding this fashionable accessory associated with flirtation and display, Ensor describes an image of domestic labor. By the 1870s fan painting had become an acceptable creative activity for ladies of the leisure class—Morisot even painted a few. But for someone from Mitche’s petit-bourgeois status, especially for a woman who did not study at the Academy like her brother and who, as the painting suggests, was taught by him, fan painting was both a creative endeavor and a way to earn an income. Mitche’s activity offered the possibility of rewards beyond personal expression for anything she might produce could be sold in the family shop. The setting, a studio filled with attributes of the artist’s life including the palette in the right foreground, validates what no doubt was a daily activity for Mitche and compares it to Ensor’s own act of painting as seen in the mirror in the background. Portraying Mitche’s creativity as productive might affirm contemporary stereotypes of working women but her placement at a respectful distance and within a studio rather than in the more accessible public space like the shop, also lends empathy to the scene, conveying the artist’s understanding of the concentrated effort and contemplation that a colorist must bring to her work. A Colorist’s informal presentation and unusual subject transform a familiar scene for Ensor and his sister into a provocative genre painting that explores the subjectivity and self-absorption of women’s experience. Like the woman in Morisot’s Young Woman at a Window (The Artist’s Sister at a Window) (Figure 4.4), Mitche is dressed informally in a day dress or “robe d’intérieur,” clothing worn exclusively in private and only in the company of family and friends. The sheer white fabric, perhaps cotton voile worn by Morisot’s model (her sister, Edma) provides the context for the artist’s masterful painting of sunlight falling on fabric as does Ensor’s description of his sister’s white dress set against the filtered light of the background window. In both paintings the women, in profile, look down at their fans. Seated in an upholstered chair Edma Pontillon gazes at the fan held half open in her hands. For women, the fan served as a silent but coded form of communication, while in popular imagery it was associated with female seduction and often described by contemporary writers as a weapon, shield, or screen, and even a magic wand that could both entice or fend off the male admirers. Rather than suggesting coquettishness, Morisot combines the fan with her model’s tilted head and distracted gaze to accent the woman’s solitude. All the pictorial elements within this intimate and privileged setting—from the woman’s seated pose and placement in this threshold space between the balcony, window, and wall, to her “at home dress” and toying gesture with the fan—join together to describe this interior space as both a place for quiet introspection or daydreaming and a metaphor for the woman’s psychological state. Similarly absorbed with her fan,

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 4.4 Berthe Morisot, The Artist’s Sister at a Window (Young Woman at a Window), 1869, oil on canvas, 54.8 × 46.3 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection (photo: courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Mitche Ensor also appears lost in thought in a solitary pose, an aspect underscored by the painting’s original title, “Seule” (“Alone”). Yet, even if she is not alone and is instead linked through the mirror to Ensor’s portrait and subjective presence, the painting accents Mitche’s preoccupied state. She may be engaged in a mundane and common activity (as the other fans on a nearby table suggest), but Ensor’s depiction of a woman in an interior in solitary thought and inaction presents a view of women’s experience rarely represented by male artists of this time. Often Ensor’s paintings focus on women’s emotional life, representing a range of moods from introspection and repose to withdrawal and psychological disconnection. In Somber Lady, Ensor places the darkened silhouette of a well-dressed but solitary woman against the defused light of a curtained window. The dark palette of muted earth tones offset by warm accents and the red umbrella set against a green divan underscores the stifling atmosphere of the room as does the model’s slumped posture and downcast eyes. While Mary Cassatt’s Portrait of Madame J (Young Woman in Black) (Figure 4.5), painted a few years later, appears at first to be quite different from Ensor’s work, it too shares a knowing sense of the isolation and interiority of women’s lives. While Ensor’s woman, also dressed in black, is set back within the salon interior, Cassatt’s figure is placed close to the viewer. Sitting on an upholstered and patterned chair that offsets her black dress, hat, and veil, the woman avoids our gaze, looking instead toward the light outside the frame. Similarly, Ensor’s lady, without a veil but dressed as if she has just arrived for a social visit and still wearing one glove, looks

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175 Figure 4.5  Mary Cassatt, Portrait of Madame J. (Young Woman in Black), 1883, oil on canvas, 80.1 × 63.5 cm, Annapolis, Maryland, Collection of the Maryland State Archives MSA SC 468010-0010 (photo: courtesy of the Maryland State Archives)

down, her body seeming to shrink into the chair. Both artists combine appearances and the social propriety of clothing and pose with an indoor setting to explore the public and private roles of women and the expectations placed upon them. Both women refuse the prying gaze of the spectator even as pose, posture, and formal attire denote each woman’s social role. At the same time, the intimate closeness of Cassatt’s model places the viewer within this feminine space assigning it the same modern significance as had a view of the café or park in paintings by her male Impressionist colleagues. Ensor likewise imbues contemporary meaning to the woman’s social ritual through the sitter’s reserved and contemplative pose and the painting’s subdued palette and setting. Both artists explore modernity and fashion, but rather than presenting them as decorative and made-up props, each painting describes the women as individuals resistant to the gaze and involved with their own experiences and thoughts. Despite their fashionable clothing, Ensor’s women turn away and look down, appearing to be absorbed or focused on a task, their posture and pose seeming to reject the exterior world streaming in through the bright windows for the more contemplative interior space. This quality of withdrawal and solitude finds its most intense rendition in Ensor’s The Lady in Distress (Plate 26) a painting that represents neither outside urban spaces nor the more public rooms of the home but rather the unusual and highly private indoor setting of a bedroom. Rarely has a woman been depicted lying or resting in bed in this fashion, turned away from the viewer as Ensor does here. When portrayed in more public interior spaces like the parlor, the image of a woman in repose on a sofa or daybed

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was a popular modernist subject, one that joins the arresting immediacy of modern life with a voyeuristic peek into the private world of women. Impressionist portraits of women reclining like Manet’s painting of his wife stretched out on a sofa (Portrait of Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa (1874, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of Monet’s wife Portrait of Madame Claude Monet (1872?, Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum), or even Monet’s portrait of his wife Meditation: Madame Monet Sitting on a Sofa, (1871, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) promoted these modernists as artistic bohemians. More indiscreet representations such as Manet’s portrayals of Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval (1862, Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Muzeum) and the poet Charles Cros’s paramour The Lady with the Fans, Nina de Callais (1873, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) as well as Manet’s rather provocative portrait of his friend the artist Berthe Morisot in Repose (Figure 4.6) intimated the libertine attitudes and radical approaches of avantgarde practice. Indeed, the bright palette, open brushwork, and informal poses of these impressionist images appear to flout tradition, even as they sustained bourgeois attitudes about women’s place in the interior. Manet certainly pushed the limits of public propriety when he painted Morisot lounging on a couch in Repose. Labeled as indecent and a challenge to good taste when shown at the 1873 Salon, this painting makes clear once again how artists like Figure 4.6 Édouard Manet, Repose, 1870, oil on canvas, 150.2 × 114 cm, Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (photo: courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.)

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Manet challenged pictorial conventions to comment on the values and priorities of modern experience. Turning Morisot’s pose from the horizontal to a frontal position and rendering her facial expression as distracted, Manet breaches portrait protocol, transforming this painting into a daring view of what a modern woman could be if allowed outside social boundaries of what Beatrice Farwell has called an “erotic fantasy piece with slightly immoral overtones.”6 Likewise, Morisot’s version of the reclining woman theme, Portrait of Mme. Marie Hubbard (1874, Copenhagen, The Ordrupgaard Collection), makes a point about the circumstances and constriction of modern women’s lives. Wearing a white peignoir and fanning herself as she lays on a bed propped up by pillows, in a pose like that taken by Mme. Monet in Renoir’s 1872 portrait, Mme. Hubbard gazes outward, her expression one of friendly familiarity. At home and at ease, this woman rests on a bed devoid of tawdry or exotic allusions, her relaxed pose within the bright corner setting combining with the directness of interaction between the model and the artist to underscore the comfort and naturalness of this view into the private space of a home by an artist who understands the pleasures of domestic life. Ensor’s The Lady in Distress painted a few years later portrays quite a different concept and mood. As we peer into the bedroom, a light-filled window at the left with its curtains pulled back allows the room’s contents to become visible. Within the shadows, a bed, small cabinet with a towel rack on a patterned rug along with a solitary bonnet establish the bedroom location and the space as feminine. Although the horizontal bed dominates the room, its placement in the middle ground distances it from our view. The curtained window behind the bed filters just enough light to glimpse of a woman reclining on the bed. Rather than encountering a model looking out to engage the viewer or the representation of impropriety, exotic fantasy, or even a display of modernist technique, Ensor’s woman lies with her body and face turned away, seemingly unaware of the viewer’s gaze. As she sinks into the bed as if pushed there by the vertical weight of the nearby window, her form seems to both materialize and dematerialize, merging the somnolent woman within the shadows of the dimly lit room. This lack of interaction and the woman’s apparent withdrawal add to the aura of silence that fills the room, an ambiance that is complemented by the painting’s muted palette of warm reds and yellows offset by touches of blue and green. While lacking the sociability of Morisot’s more outgoing portrait of Mme. Hubbard, Ensor’s painting does retain a similar intimacy, implying that this room and this experience are recognizable and even commonplace. In The Lady in Distress Ensor paints a space that he knows well, making it empathetic and familiar for all. At the same time, by exhibiting The Lady in Distress publicly at Les XX, Ensor continues the dialogue between public and private life also represented in his domestic “bourgeois” interiors and depictions of Ostend life discussed in Chapter 3. Unlike the Impressionists whose interior scenes focus attention on interpersonal relationships between the artist and his model or family members, on narratives of domesticity, and, especially in the paintings by the women Impressionists, on moments of intimacy and the social life of women, all conveyed through the bright, color-infused palette, Ensor’s paintings of singular figures in closed quiet interiors explore the insular confinement of women’s everyday experience. Alone, their bodies self-contained and introverted, their gaze either averted or attentive to a task, Ensor’s paintings of women embody the

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emotional and psychological impact of their confined state. This sensitive consideration of women’s experience is never more apparent than in The Lady in Distress a painting whose bedroom setting underscores the privacy of the view and whose depiction of a woman in bed in the middle of the day publicly describes, as the title makes clear, the symptoms of psychological withdrawal or perhaps the emotional disorder of neurasthenia or depression. Quite unlike the more topical images of women associated with artifice or bourgeois pleasure often seen at the Salon, this painting’s glimpse into the private interior world of women presents a nuanced understanding of individual subjectivity and the modern life experiences of women that were also being studied at this time by the emerging social science of psychology and in research by Charcot and others on neurosis and hysteria. As well, when shown at a venue like Les XX, this painting introduced the Belgian public to the perspective of the emerging Symbolist movement with its focus on interiority and subjectivity. The Oyster Eater (Plate 13), discussed in Chapter  3, varies from Ensor’s other depictions of singular women in interiors in several significant ways. Mitche again serves as the model. Neither posed, ill, nor asleep, waiting or withdrawn into her thoughts, she sits at a table in the more sociable space of the dining room where she is portrayed as active and very much engrossed in consuming her meal. Unlike Ensor’s other interiors, there is no window in the background. The light source comes instead from the sideboard behind the woman that closes off a view of the room even as its mirror reflects the dining room’s sunny ambiance. A lighter brighter palette of reds and yellows creates an intense visual field of saturated color and reflected light. Given the oyster eater’s ample presence and the paintings large scale (it is much larger than the other paintings of singular women in interiors), this depiction of a woman’s experience, especially one that portrays an intimate meal, was an important subject for Ensor. When he showed The Oyster Eater at the 1886 Les XX salon, Ensor also exhibited Lady in Distress, setting up a comparison between the two paintings. Even though they share the same model and indoor setting, The Oyster Eater and The Lady in Distress are startlingly different in composition, lighting, and subject. With its cool palette, somber ambiance, dimly lit bedroom, and distanced figure, The Lady in Distress creates a pictorial mood of contemplation and introversion while also suggesting the physical and emotional toll of a confined life. The Oyster Eater describes a more convivial, even extroverted woman within a more sociable and public space in a painting that entices with its display of the pleasures of dining rendered tactilely and sensuously close. Rather than the withdrawn, possibly depressed woman of Lady in Distress, The Oyster Eater is wholly part of her milieu. At home, absorbed with her appetizing meal, and seated at a table full of flowers, food, and drink in a setting saturated with warm sunlight, the woman diner of The Oyster Eater truly appears to enjoy, even delight in the pleasures of the home and domestic life. While Ensor’s paintings sensitively describe the diverse aspects of the domestic sphere and women’s experiences at home, they offer quite different insights than Morisot and Cassatt’s depictions of women in indoor settings. Indeed when Cassatt does show singular women at home, they are usually observed occupied with a singular activity like reading or sewing and represented with a reserve and respect that reflects the decorum of their class, not enjoying a meal with such gusto as Mitche does in The

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Oyster Eater. Only one of Ensor’s depictions of single women indoors, Lady in Grey, a portrait of Mme. Felix Buelens, moves toward a more traditional image of middle-class domesticity akin to Morisot and Cassatt’s images of singular women sewing. Like Ensor, Cassatt’s women know the constraints that society has imposed on them. Absent in the work of both Cassatt and Morisot are scenes of women in their bedrooms, although as discussed above, Morisot did depict images of women on daybeds in casual poses that reflected the friendly exchange between the sitter and the artist. Both women Impressionists also share with Ensor an interest in intimacy as viewed through the subject of women indoors. Cassatt represented this aspect in numerous paintings of mothers with their children and etchings of women at their toilette; Morisot made paintings of women dressing, bathing, or combing their hair, while Ensor portrays these private moments through nonpublic and often withdrawn scenes of women waiting, asleep, or daydreaming. Ensor’s paintings of bourgeois salons continue this exploration of the intimate interior, assigning value and meaning to women’s experiences through an accumulation of appearances, associations, and details. As Morisot and Cassatt, Ensor’s subject remains women’s sociability at home but while their paintings engage the viewer with an intimate and knowing representation of home life, Ensor’s paintings of bourgeois interiors maintain a more objective distance and formality. In Afternoon in Ostend (Figure 3.1), Ensor sets one such social occasion, the bourgeois tea held in the family salon, one of the more public spaces of the home. Mary Cassatt’s The Tea, also painted in 1880, (Figure  4.7) finds significance in the same subject—a social visit between

Figure 4.7  Mary Stevenson Cassatt, The Tea, c. 1880, oil on canvas, 64.77 × 92.07 cm, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (photo: © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

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women at home. Like Ensor, Cassatt sets one figure in profile and the other frontally and includes a tea set on the table to establish the social protocol for the event. Even if their palette and technique are quite different, both painters immerse their models in a domestic interior dominated by dense textures and patterns that convey, along with the indirect light source, a feeling of enclosed confinement. Both artists compare types, with one woman more reserved, like the lady on the left in Cassatt’s painting (her sister, Lydia) whose pose with one arm close to the body and a hand touching her face suggests reflective contemplation. Similarly, the woman on the right in Ensor’s painting, her hands holding a cup, appears constrained, but her shadowed face and posture with arms held close to the torso implies reticence or disinterest rather than participation. By contrast, the other figure, a younger woman, is more extroverted as she leans forward in a more informal, open pose. Dressed fashionably with a hat and gloves as was typical for women visiting, she looks out engagingly as if anticipating another visitor to this salon (whose teacup and saucer can be seen on the tray). Like Ensor’s young lady, Cassatt’s other figure also wears a hat and gloves. Holding her cup to her lips, she averts her eyes all the while exchanging discreet glances with the other woman in the room. With its careful attention to detail and the women’s proximity to each other and the tea set and table discretely separating them from the viewer, keeping their social rituals at a respectable distance, Cassatt’s presents a subtle but knowing description of the way women socialize and communicate within the dictums of social decorum and the conventions of their class. Ensor, less informed perhaps about the dynamics of women’s sociability, but willing nonetheless to describe and find value in their experiences, stages a scene of modern Belgian life at home with his sister and mother serving as models. With its casual informality, Ensor’s Bourgeois Salon (Plate 7) embodies even more of the middle-class values of the artist’s daily experience. Berthe Morisot’s Mme. Morisot and Her Daughter Mme. Pointillon (The Mother and Sister of the Artist) (Figure 4.8) describes a similar scene of women relaxing at home. Once again, two women occupy an interior with Ensor’s figures gathered around a table and Morisot’s seated on a couch. Ensor’s painting pushes the women (once again his aunt and sister) back into the middle ground of the salon where they are depicted in solitary activities of sewing and reading. Morisot’s women fill most of the pictorial space and are placed nearer to the foreground, all the better to observe their relationship and their social class. Light flows in from a window, seen in the mirror reflection behind Mme. Pointillon, enveloping the two women with a bright yet defused sunlight that allows Morisot to show off her ability to both render different surface effects even as she describes the interaction between the women, one who reads and the other who appears to simultaneously listen and be lost in thought. Like Cassatt, Morisot renders the comfort, erudite pursuits, and quiet pleasures of women’s domestic life within carefully composed, reassuring interiors that maintain the decorum of upper-middle-class reserve. Ensor’s painting describes women busy at more mundane tasks, unaware of the artist or viewer, their bodies and activities subsumed within the musty ambiance of the parlor. Like Morisot, Ensor dwells on the possessions that define this space as bourgeois while at the same time exploring the expressive potential of such interior places. Warm bright light from the window moves across the room, enveloping the women and their surroundings,

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181 ­ igure 4.8 Berthe F Morisot, Mme. Morisot and Her Daughter Mme. Pointillon (The Mother and Sister of the Artist), 1869, oil on canvas, 101 × 71 cm, Washington, D.C., National Gallery, Chester Dale Collection (photo: courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

lending every object and figure both weight and tactile materiality. In this manner, Ensor constructs a view of bourgeois life whose specificity in terms of place and gender—individual women immersed in and part of their surrounding—is bestowed with a broader social significance. Unlike Morisot’s painting, Ensor’s interest lies less with a description of the actuality of women’s experience and the social rituals that fill their lives than with representing the material rewards of petit-bourgeois aspiration as reflected in the comforts of the home and hearth. Ensor continues this concern in the value and significance of the feminine domestic space in several still-life paintings made at the same time as his bourgeois salons and depictions of singular women in interiors. Assigned the generic title of chinoiseries, a nod to the current fad for all things Chinese and Japanese, these carefully chosen arrangements of objects on a studio table often covered with a shawl elicit the feminine space of the interior through an intimate yet tactile exchange between the material world, tantalizing described in muted light and saturated color, and the enticing and evocative artifice of the painted arrangement. Chinoiseries with Fans (1880, Brussels, RMFAB), exhibited at Les XX in 1884 (no. 6), for example, is composed entirely of things associated with women, socializing, and the home. Several fans, a pair of blue gloves, a maraca, and ceramic vessels are arranged on a blue shawl along with a vase, teacup, and teapot in front of a tall screen, inviting the viewer to discover the tactile pleasure and emotive meaning woven into this subtle arrangement.

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Ensor’s fascination with the material possessions of the domestic sphere and women’s experience continues throughout the 1880s. Clocks, vases, and mirrors are juxtaposed or freely associated in his drawings with family members, furniture, and the hearth as Ensor conflates women with the domestic interior and the intimate moments of life at home. As Beverly Gordon has noted, in the industrial age, the conceptual association of women’s bodies with interior spaces was so prevalent that they often became interchangeable, a relationship Ensor makes visible in works like Nude with Balustrade (1880–85/1886–88, Düsseldorf, Kunstpalast) where he juxtaposes a female nude with masks, a statue, a chinoiserie vase, and a detailed drawing of the balustrade on an armoire in the Ensor family dining room.7 Similarly, Bronze Pot with Apparitions (1880–85/1886–88, Ghent, MSK) (Figure 4.9) joins a woman’s body with a bronze pot and Nude with Curtain (1886–88, Düsseldorf, Kunstpalast) superimposes an earlier sketch of a woman (possibly his sister) with both a nude figure and a curtain. Other drawings like the Haunted Fireplace (1888; Belgium, Private collection) (Figure 1.11) draws the viewer close, further integrating both the furniture and the women into the domestic sphere. With Ensor’s face peering down from the mirror above the hearth, this drawing also connects the domestic interior of the family home with the artist’s expressive subjectivity, an aspect that can be found in other self-portraits from the mid-1880s where his face and upper body gaze outward from within darkened interiors. This aspect is more developed in My Sad and Splendid Portrait where Ensor’s face emerges from an armoire, his own identity now conjoined with personal, private, and often the feminine space of the domestic interior. At times, these female-centered interior spaces are animated by the inventive possibilities of free association and personal subjectivity. The Haunted Armoire (originally titled The Old Dresser), 1885, 1888–90, Ostend, Mu.ZEE destroyed in Figure 4.9  James Ensor, Bronze Pot with Apparitions, 1880-85/1886-88, Black crayon on paper mounted on cardboard, 22.7 × 16.7 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost)

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firebombing, May, 1940) looks into the Ensor family dining room where a woman (Mitche) seated in profile sewing and a young girl, who looks up from her reading to engage our eye, attend to their tasks. Ensor later reworked this painting, adding masks, skeletons, and several figures stacked along the perimeter and emerging from the surrounding furniture, transforming this mundane everyday interior into a space of fantasy and invention. Numerous sketchbook drawings from the 1880s of the hearth and mirror and other views of the salon follow a similar approach as Ensor augments drawings with fantastic details and often grotesque figures. In the process, the domestic interior that lent both visibility and value to women’s experience also becomes the site for Ensor’s peculiar and imaginative inner vision, one that can be manipulated and arranged to explore not only the expressive potential of the interior but also, as the Haunted Fireplace and Scandalized Masks intimate, the tensions and dynamics of interpersonal relationships within the modern family.

The Problematic Nude Ensor’s paintings of women in interiors and his numerous drawings of the female members of his family call attention to his facility of working from observation, but his representation of the nude drew from his academic training. Like many of his contemporaries at the Brussels Academy, Ensor made copies of plaster casts in classical poses and later life studies, possibly at his home studio, of shirtless male models in strong light against plain backdrops. As the awkward poses and lack of descriptive detail make clear, these nude studies, while not particularly accomplished, are typical academic exercises meant to develop observational and drawing skills. Most of these images of nude and seminude men remained in his studio but Ensor later reworked at least one of the paintings, Masks Watching a Negro Tumbler (1878–79, c. 1890, Belgium, Private collection), adding masks, a tortoise, and an oil lamp to the composition sometime between 1888 and 1890. Despite the distraction of these additions, the black male awkwardly posed on a box in Masks Watching a Negro Tumbler provides further evidence that Ensor had little experience painting the nude from life. He preferred copying instead, taking his images either from magazines and photographs or from small sculptures as seen for example in Attributes of the Fine Arts (Attributes of the Studio) 1889 (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek). Ensor’s representation of the female nude is even more limited, especially at the beginning of his career. Like Diana (1877, Belgium, Private collection), after Ernest Chassériau’s Toilet of Esther, many of his early academic paintings that include naked or seminude women are allegorical and copied from paintings or reproductions. In this aspect, Ensor follows standard academic practice for developing pictorial narrative and multi-figured compositions. Whether mythological, historical, or religious in subject, Ensor’s painted studies feature clothed women as heroines or central protagonists. His sketchbooks contain more drawings of nudes, many of them copies after Delacroix and other nineteenth-century artists. The male and female nudes in Bronze Pot and Apparitions and a nude female in Woman near

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Curtain are also copies, as the idealized bodies bear little resemblance to the figures or casual poses found in Ensor’s drawings of people in the street or models posed in the studio. Only a few extant examples of female nudes drawn from life are known, most notably several small drawings of naked women on lined sheets of notebook paper now in the collection of the Antwerp Museum (KMSKA 2712/60–64), and a sketch for a title page for a collection of Théo Hannon’s Ostend Histories (KMSK 2712/159). When Ensor returned to making paintings and drawings of the nude later in his career, he continued the practice of copying from a range of sources including photographs and prints from journals. In several of his still-life paintings beginning in the late 1890s, Ensor often included images based upon standing and seated terracotta statues of the popular Tanagra figure that were sold in the family shop. At the turn of the century, Ensor returns to the nude, making numerous erotic drawings of nymphs and bathers. While far more provocative than earlier nudes, these works retain an ironic distance that suggests they too were copied from other sources, including pornography. Collectively titled Endless Pleasure, this group of drawings contains exaggerated erotic scenarios and fantasy scenes drawn from imagination. One drawing depicts a frontally posed young woman, her legs open and pubic hair fully evident, surrounded by many men some who gaze upon her exposed vulva while others lick her feet, legs, and arms. Another drawing, titled Endless Pleasure-Woman shows a reclining naked woman attacked from all sides by penises while in Endless Pleasure-Man a male nude is surrounded by vaginas that he fondles, licks, or, at the center, inserts his erect penis, while other vulva float or line up, apparently awaiting their turn.8 In 1903 Ensor made a series of nine erotic colored pencil drawings that are associated with more classical representations of the nude including nymphs and satyrs that he combines with images of copulation, grotesques vanitas, and Christian iconography.9 Some of these prints and drawings can be understood as the fantasies of an aging artist and others might have been produced for individual collectors. A drawing from around 1920, Nymph Embracing a Herm (Brussels, Royal Library, Print Cabinet) makes clear Ensor’s equivocal view of female sexuality with an image that includes a voluptuous nude, a female picador with a bull, a toasting Bacchus, a kissing couple, and a vomiting man, all surrounding a herm who is suggestively embraced by a laurel-crowned figure. Less erotic than voyeuristic, more involved with adulation of the phallus than the female body, this drawing, like the works of Rops, Manet, and others, comments on contemporary social mores and views on sexuality and obscenity. A number of these late drawings portray nude women as nymphs who frolic with satyrs in landscapes or gardens. Inelegant and awkwardly drawn, these more playful, noncanonical women’s bodies that visualized Ensor’s fantasies remain rather obvious in their rude and explicit depiction of sexual acts and satirizing of the classical ideal. These examples of nudes, painted, drawn, or copied, many made after 1900, are quite different from Ensor’s early large and ambitious painting of nude bodies, Children at Their Morning Toilette (Children Dressing) 1886 (Plate 27). Initially, this painting seems to be a variation of his bourgeois salon paintings with the multicolored rug locating the scene in the family parlor or perhaps a bedroom. Warm saturated light streaming in from tall, floor-to-ceiling windows surrounds two nude figures standing

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in the middle ground. A chest, armoire, and fireplace add verisimilitude to the scene while a rich mixture of color contrasts from the green and brown textured rug, the reddish veneer of the furniture, and the yellows of the curtained windows imbue the room with a mood of intimate, quiet ambiance. Although immersed in this subtle interior light, the two nudes seem oddly disconnected from their surroundings. Close inspection reveals that, as with Ensor’s other nudes, these figures were not drawn from life but rather copied from other sources and added later. Initially, Ensor blocked out the composition in broad areas of light and shadow and filled in the details from observation, adding the furniture and lastly the figures that he blended into the scene using thin layers of paint. The standing figure retains none of the ambient light that falls across the cabinet from the window while the vaguely rendered seated figure on the left is only partially integrated into space. Red lines trace the contours of the seated figure’s body, visually joining it with the chair, but the face remains blurred and cast in shadow. The other figure reaches toward a pitcher with an awkwardly rendered arm while standing in contrapposto pose looking out toward the viewer. Just what Ensor is representing here also remains uncertain. The title Children at Their Morning Toilette (which has been subtitled as both Children Dressing and Children Washing) implies a rather mundane and commonplace subject, the morning bath. Although the two nudes are frontally posed, there is little else in the painting to indicate they are dressing. Other details suggest that, rather than dressing, the figures are captured in the act of bathing, a popular theme in nineteenth-century art. Although no basin is visible, originally the seated child had a foot placed in a bowl. Later, Ensor painted over the bowl with the rug pattern while the standing figure reaches for a pitcher, a vessel commonly used for washing. Whether these two figures are dressing or bathing, the tactile, atmospheric quality of the interior setting lends their representation a material presence, bringing the physicality and sensuality of two naked bodies into intimate proximity, even as the raised viewpoint seeks to distance the voyeuristic perspective. At the same time, Ensor disguises the underlying eroticism of the scene by obscuring anatomical details. The chest and lower body of the seated figure lack definition, making it difficult to ascertain either gender or age other than that this child is young with an undeveloped body. With its exaggerated pose and swaying curve of the belly, small breasts, and an alluring look, the standing figure displays all the characteristics of a young pubescent girl. If the exact subject of Children at Their Morning Toilette (Children Dressing) remains uncertain, its depiction of young nude bodies in an interior is quite unusual, at a time when the very notion of childhood and its links to sexuality had just begun to be studied in the emerging disciplines of psychology, sociology, and criminal justice. France and other European countries had experienced a “cult of childhood” throughout the century represented in paintings of children intimately linked, as Anna Green has shown, to class and gender and bourgeois attitudes toward sexuality.10 Although nineteenth-century opinion was divided as to if sexuality was part of childhood, there was a fascination in both art and literature with precocious sexuality in children associated with both modern experience and voyeurism. Immigrant and lower-class children of both sexes were depicted as dangerous, highly visible, and

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an often available part of the modern spectacle. At the same time, bourgeois family values reinforced the respectability of middle-class girls who were often portrayed as confined, passive, innocent, and oblivious of sexual attraction. Working-class girls (especially Italian street urchins) became a frequent and popular subject in both paintings and popular prints of the mid-century along with girls working in the theater, circus, ballet, and brothel, where they were often depicted as sexually available but infantilized “child-women.” Likewise, even as representations of working-class boys exemplified the picturesque and threateningly dangerous allure of the modern urban experience, images of bourgeois boys supported the understanding of adolescence as a developmental stage between child and man that joined male sexuality with youthful masculinity and virility while also reinforcing their public and social role. While narratives with adolescent protagonists can be found in literary texts (Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to mind), paintings that include non-allegorical images of nude young bodies in interior settings are rare until Munch’s startling depiction of budding sexuality in his 1895 Puberty (Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet). Ensor intends these two figures to be adolescents, but it is quite unlikely that he would have posed nude pubescent children, male or female, in the family parlor. Instead, Ensor turned to source material from popular culture, possibly photographs of women prostitutes in bathing poses or erotic lithographic prints of scantily clad women as modern nymphs who dress or wash, providing a voyeuristic look into this private activity. The seated nude with crossed legs bears resemblance not only to classical representations of Diana at her bath but also to popular semi-pornographic recreations. Full-scale paintings of bathing nudes were also on view at the Salon, where a classical subject added the thin veneer of appropriateness to the display of a naked body. French and British Impressionists made a few paintings of nudes, often in outdoor settings, but even in the late nineteenth century the representation of a nude indoors without a whiff of allegorical reference was most often associated with prostitution and pornography as the controversy over Manet’s Olympia made clear. While allegorical paintings of nude women bathing outdoors were quite common, depictions of nude adolescents whether bathing or in interiors, were less so. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whom Ensor admired, included young male nudes in several of his allegories, as did Edgar Degas in his painting, Young Spartans Exercising 1860–63, re-worked until 1880 (London, National Gallery). Like Ensor, William Stout of Oldham painted nude adolescents in modern, plein-air settings. Yet, unlike Ensor, Stout’s The Bathers (1882 Munich, Staatsgemaldesammlungen), a painting exhibited at the 1884 Les XX salon, set in the hazy light of a summer’s day, allied the naked bodies of these bathing boys with allegory and idyll in a similar fashion to Puvis de Chavannes’s paintings and murals. Ensor’s painting remains closer to works by his colleague Félicien Rops, who made several etchings that prominently featured nude adolescent women, like the young girl in his 1884 illustration of “Le Plus Bel Amour de Don Juan” for Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (Figure 4.10), that explicitly joins the young female body with overtones of erotic desire. While sharing similar source material as Rops, Ensor’s painting obscures any underlying sexual content. Instead, the atypical combination of nude figures and warm and colorful interior space heightens the sensuosity of the scene. As well, unlike Rops’s images, Ensor’s nudes in

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Figure 4.10  Félicien Rops, “Le plus bel amour de Don Juan,” Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques, 1886, etching, 28 × 21 cm, Namur, Musée Félicien Rops (© Brussels, KIK-IRPA, photo: Jacques Declercq)

Children at Their Morning Toilette are hardly confrontational, their ill-defined bodies and faces placed at a distance from the viewer. The spark of sexuality hovers over the scene however, emboldened perhaps by the exchange of glances between the centralized standing figure and the viewer. The immediacy of the light, the setting, and the painting’s title lend the pretext of normalcy, undermining any association of the image with the exploitation of adolescent bodies or prostitution. With its soft focus and vague anatomical detail, Children at Their Morning Toilette glosses over any suggestion of childhood sexuality to present instead this interior with nudes as both a light study (Ensor titled the painting “Etude de lumière” (Study in Light) when he exhibited it at La Libre Esthètique in 1908 (no. 80)) and a modern allegory of feminine intimacy, a representation that invites the pleasure of looking into a space allied with women, privacy, and revelry.

The Profane and the Sacred Ensor was not the first nineteenth-century artist to explore contemporary ideas and mores through the abject display of the female body—his favorite French artists Manet and Courbet had done so since the 1860s—yet as Children at Their Morning Toilette suggests, his engagement with the nude was both unconventional and typical. In some of his work, the naked female body is depicted as grotesque, monstrous, and linked to violence reiterating the stereotype of the profane “femme fatale” or fatal woman prominent in popular culture. In other works, Ensor pays homage to the sacred or spiritual woman, especially as embodied by the Virgin Mary. Influenced by his petit-bourgeois upbringing and contemporary social attitudes, the sacred-profane

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dialogue of these images makes visible Ensor’s vacillating view of women, even as they diverge from the sympathetic representation of the feminine sphere found in his paintings of women in interiors. In Ensor’s many portrayals of the Temptation of St. Anthony, the profane nude is often allied with the material world. His largest treatment of the subject, the multi-sheet drawing now at The Art Institute of Chicago (Plate 20) the female nude in her many aspects is intertwined with battle scenes, animal-headed devilish warriors, skeletons, and grotesques. On a shared panel on Anthony’s right side, a snake-like Harpy and her sibyl-like companions look primordial, even subhuman. Nearby, the multi-breasted goddess Diana based upon Flaubert’s description and contemporary illustrations of sculptures of the goddess stands as her lower body turns into a tail that extends into the section below. Juxtaposing Diana (Artemis) of Ephesus, the moon goddess associated with light, virginity, chastity, and childbirth, with Harpy and her bevy of grotesque sibyls, Ensor contrasts the ideal, virginal feminine with her seductive, destructive, and profane double. Two historical figures, the Queens Sheba and Parysatis, continue the drawing’s underlying sacred-profane discourse. Directly above St. Anthony’s cowled head the Queen of Sheba stands in a shell-like grotto. Naked except for her crown, Ensor’s Sheba bears little resemblance to Flaubert’s description of an exotically dressed woman. Instead, Ensor connects this figure with imagery of the classical Venus, who despite her nudity is both modest and simply presented, her pale form set apart from the densely crowded panels below. About ten years earlier, Ensor’s contemporary Paul Cézanne also represented a naked Sheba in several paintings and drawings on the Temptation of St. Anthony. Even though both artists chose to depict the Queen as a nude, Ensor, unlike Cézanne, emphasizes in his drawing neither the queen’s sexualized, fleshy body, nor her attempt, described at length by Flaubert, to seduce the hermit. Rather than a seductive woman, Ensor’s Sheba appears between the saint and the floating head of Christ where she becomes both a Venus figure and a stand-in for the Virgin Mary. Acting as an intermediary between the material world below and the spiritual world above, this naked virginal figure embodies the ideal, spiritual woman of St. Anthony’s vision. Ensor includes another queen—Queen Parysatis, wife of Darius II—on St. Anthony’s left. The story of Queen Parysatis came to light during the excavation of the palaces of Darius and Artaxerxes at Susa in the 1880s by Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy (1844–1920) and his wife, Jane (1851–1916). Ensor’s interest in this obscure figure from Persian history may have been peaked by Mme. Dieulafoy’s journal recounting the couple’s adventures and discoveries published in Tout du Monde and two books published in 1887 and 1888 illustrated with photogravures.11 In Ensor’s Temptation, Parysatis is depicted in the act of slaying the eunuch Masabetes, an act of revenge for his role in the death of her favored son, Cyrus. Masabetes had cut off Cyrus’s head and hand on the orders of his master, Artaxerxes II, Parysatis’s other son. In the drawing, Ensor dwells on the gruesome detail of Parysatis’s retribution, depicting a naked Queen cutting open the eunuch’s chest with a knife. As blood drips from Masabetes’s wound another nude servant stands ready with both a dagger and a severed organ. According to historical accounts, Parysatis was

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also responsible for the death by poison of Stateira, Artaxerxes’s popular wife, a deed that Ensor alludes to in the next panel where two naked women stab another woman with a knife. In what is perhaps another reference to Parysatis, directly above this pair a seminude woman flays a man tied to a stake while another woman dressed in a warrior’s costume brandishes a sword. Even though the stories of both Queen Parysatis and Sheba are about powerful women from ancient times, Ensor depicts each quite differently. Despite their common nudity, Sheba, portrayed in the Bible and other texts as a leader known for her power as well as her submission to Solomon, floats above the dense scenes and grotesque figures below her, her small but radiant body beheld by both St. Anthony and the viewer. Parysatis, on the other hand, is part of a dense, crowded panel as she is seen performing a public execution, her nudity making her act of flaying even more transgressive. Indeed, rather than an image of a mother seeking revenge for her dead son, Ensor portrays Parysatis as a threatening, aggressive, and deadly femme fatale made all the more evident by additions of red pencil highlights that accent the blood flowing from the eunuch’s body. When Ensor returned to Parysatis’s legend in his 1899 etching, Queen Parysatis Flaying a Eunuch (T.116, E. 121) (Figure 4.11), that copied in reverse the earlier drawing, he highlighted the knife and Masabetes bloody entrails with red pencil or gouache, once again underscoring the gruesome torture inflicted by this fatal woman. A crowd, consisting mostly of heads, some wearing caps and top hats, and piled one upon one another, surrounds both torture scenes further accentuating the public spectacle and sadism of Parysatis’s revenge. As if these images of naked Figure 4.11  James Ensor, Queen Parysatis 1900, etching on paper, 2nd state, 17.1 × 12 cm, Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus PK.MP.04947 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

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women were not enough to visualize St. Anthony’s duress, Ensor includes a witch-like procession of nude women with grotesque bodies and bulging bellies—some of whom give birth to serpents and demons—as they confront the saint with their excessive, exposed bodies. In other versions of the St. Anthony narrative, Ensor’s historical or mythological references are more general with nude women associated with the seductions of the flesh. In the Tribulations of St. Anthony (Plate 19) the red-robed saint is distracted from his book by two pink nudes, one near the saint and the other in profile. Both are surrounded by muck, detritus, and numerous grotesque figures. Ensor repeats the pink opalescent color associated with women’s fleshy bodies in the bird-monster at the painting’s center and again in the red sulfurous clouds that rise from Hades across the  water from St. Anthony, making the confrontation between the material world of the flesh and St. Anthony’s quest for the spiritual viscerally real. A drawing from the  early 1890s (Belgium, Private collection) depicts a decidedly earthy, even bestial Queen of Sheba, who has grown web-like feet and a tail and is surrounded by hybrid animals. Appearing in a mandorla as if part of a vision, she faces Anthony and displays her naked body. This contrast between the sacred, embodied by Anthony, who is distracted from his bible, and this profane Sheba is reinforced by Ensor’s inclusion of another nude woman with a pig’s face wearing a hat who stands near the saint. Numerous strange animal grotesques swirl around Sheba, including a hairy figure, which holds up a shield to deflect the sight of her naked body, and a group of men carrying a pig. The whole scene is witnessed by a crowd, suggesting, like the Tribulation, the public meaning of this image as a struggle between the physicality of a naked Sheba and Anthony’s desire for the spiritual. Ensor creates an even more fantastic vision in Wizards in a Squall (1896, Brussels, RMFAB) where St. Anthony, despite his prayerful pose, is distracted by a sky filled with naked witch-women who ride brush-like broomsticks or float by on clouds. Behind St. Anthony, a devil dressed as a priest whispers in his ear, further distracting the saint from his prayer while in the background, a crucified Christ on a cross counters the swirling physicality of the naked women in the sky. Unlike his representations of bourgeois women in salons, the profane nudes of these works replicate the image of the fatal woman popular in nineteenth-century art and literature that associate the voyeuristic display of nudity with the seductive and overwhelming sexuality of a woman’s body. Ensor was no doubt familiar with one of the most notorious of these evocations, Félicien Rops’s Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 4.12) owned by Edmond Picard and on view at the 1884 Les XX salon. In this gouache and colored crayon drawing, a young woman, whose casual stance, seductive expression, and pubic body hair reinforces physicality and her sexuality, poses triumphantly naked on a cross before a bearded St. Anthony. As he looks up from reading what looks like an erotic text the saint grasps his head in horror, his reaction to the sight of this woman embodied by the backward pitch of his body. At the same time, a red-robed devil standing behind the cross pushes an emaciated crucified Christ away as a pig looks on from the side and skeletons throw flowers on the scene from above. Despite the sign on the cross with the words “EROS,” Rops claimed that the image was not about eroticism, nudity, or religion but rather about modernity. Along with his

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191 Figure 4.12 Félicien Rops, Temptation of St. Anthony, 1878, pastel and gouache on paper, 73.8 × 54.3 cm, Brussels, KBR, Cabinet des Estampes, Drawing S.V 86652 (© KBR, photo: KBR, Brussels)

other representations of modern woman like Pornocrates (1878, Namur, Musée Félicien Rops) or various versions of Woman with Jumping Jack (1873, 1877, c.1883–85), Rops’s Temptation perpetuates stereotypes of the profane woman and the association of her naked or semi-naked body with disruptive carnal temptation, deploying a strategy that Ensor would also use that joins confrontational display (here, the female body) with a critique of the social order and current morality. Like Rops’s Temptation, Ensor’s large multipaneled The Temptation of St. Anthony uses the juxtaposition of both the sacred and spiritual woman to imply that pain, torture, and destruction, especially of women, can lead to transformation and spiritual liberation. An etching of 1888 entitled The Flaying (L’Échorché) or Flaying a Convict (T.57) reworks the Parysatis panel of The Temptation of St. Anthony. As the larger drawing, in the etching, a nude woman stands and cuts open a man lashed to a pole, but now her nakedness has been embellished with high stockings or boots and a dagger belted to her waist adding a fetishistic element to what is already a cruel, even sadistic scene. This print accents an undercurrent of sex and violence in Ensor’s representation of women that can be found in other works of the late 1880s. His 1888 etching Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels (T.23, Cr. 24) (Figure 4.13) also known as The Fight of the Demons, itself an amalgam of Martin Schongauer’s Temptation of St. Anthony

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice

Figure  4.13 James Ensor, Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels, 1889, etching and watercolor on paper, 1/1, 26.5 × 30.5 cm, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Museum PlantinMoretus PK.MP.09469 (photo: https://dams.antwerpen.be, Museum Plantin-Moretus)

(c.1470–1475) and Pieter Brueghel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels with additional elements drawn from Jacques Callot and Hieronymus Bosch, is a case in point. In Ensor’s version, the devils and other creatures mount a particularly violent and vicious attack not just against St. Anthony but also the angels, several who are females wearing armor. Other angels are strange hybrid figures—part woman, part beast—who battle against equally grotesque and skeletal devil figures, strange and exotic fish, an octopus, and other fantastic creatures. Throughout the print, women are assaulted: at the top, two women are stabbed by a swordfish, another at the right is sexually violated with a sword. At the center, a falling armored angel has her vagina pierced by a long spear (embellished with red watercolor in some versions) that extends from the central Anthony-like figure. Although it is hard to tell who is winning or losing this battle in this etching, as The Temptation of St. Anthony, the viewer is placed in the middle of a hallucination in which the sacred and profane merge into a transgressive image filled with violence of an often sexual nature. Aggressive sexual women also make an appearance in Ensor’s early academic paintings based on the Bible. Judith and Holofernes (1879, Belgium, Private collection)

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dwells not on the Old Testament’s story of sexual exploitation for the higher purpose of Hebrew victory but instead on castration and Judith’s seductive, deadly role as a biblical femme fatale. Even if the grotesque creatures that Ensor added later distract from the painting’s violent imagery, they also direct attention to the centrally positioned Judith, who holds both a large and bloody knife near Holofernes’s groin and his decapitated head next to her breasts. Small Persian Torture (1893, Belgium, Private collection) also explores the sadistic and erotic potential of ancient history. An elaborate architectural setting and exotic costumes along with the many heads in the foreground suggests a grand theatrical setting. But the inclusion of several female nudes—one decapitated, another stabbed in the stomach, and a pair in the middle ground held by chains—makes it clear that this dramatic orientalist fantasy is but the occasion for Ensor to imagine a voyeuristic spectacle of exotic sadism that again links the naked female body with seduction, torture, and death. Associated with the seduction of the physical world and the threat of monstrous and excessive sexuality, the often-naked female bodies in Ensor’s many representations of St. Anthony’s temptation also speak to the way nineteenth-century social constructions of the feminine shaped the artist’s personal experience and practice. Contrary and perverse and often surrounded by violence and torture, these exaggerated and often cruel depictions mirror contemporary attitudes in their reiteration of common misogynous tropes. Yet even as Ensor’s profane nudes imply the artist’s ambivalence toward women, they allow him to represent his masculinity in socially acceptable ways that affirm his contrary difference while also evading questions about the nature of his sexuality.

Woman as Artifice: Make-up, Masks, and Fashion The profane woman reappears in Old Woman with Masks, also known as Theater of Masks or Bouquet d’ Artifice (Plate 28), as Ensor uses masquerade to explore the relationship between nature and artifice. Initially, a portrait that he later re-worked, the painting depicts a woman, her head crowned with flowers, staring outward as if looking in a mirror, while all around large and small masks and grinning and grimacing masked figures, press forward. A vigorous brushstroke combines with strong, often raw color to emphasize the materiality of the painting’s surface and the contrivance of its design. Setting up a comparison between grotesques, that is, the obvious theatricality of masks and the ludicrous unnaturalness of a woman’s madeup face, beauty marks, and facial hair, Ensor explores the artifice of cosmetics in the construction of beauty. For Baudelaire, a woman can attempt through fashion and make-up to bring out the ideal, that is, to evoke the eternal within the transitory, but her artifice is caricatural, a reminder of the true ugliness of nature. According to Baudelaire, the crude, unnatural, even deformed image of a made-up woman leads men to recognize both their own superiority and the unobtainable ideal of beauty. This caricatural doubling, that is, the mirroring of art and life by juxtaposing the grotesque with the ideal, reveals then the ironic dualism of beauty within ugliness and the sacred within the profane. No wonder

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Ensor found masks to be the perfect vehicle for his work as they provided a place where artifice and invention toppled the tyranny of nature, allowing, as he wrote to Pol de Mont, for both confrontation and critique: “I also loved these masks because they so irritated the public which had received me so badly.”12 As Old Woman with Masks makes clear, by the late 1880s, Ensor’s representation of women had shifted. His early work presented an empathetic depiction of the middleclass woman’s experience as set within the carefully observed spaces of domestic interiors awash with the light, color, and atmosphere of modern life. In later works, the modern woman is seen through her more public aspects—beauty, fashion, and display. Bonnets, scarves, fabric, dresses, jackets, and umbrellas—the accessories of a welldressed woman—serve as studio props that Ensor combines with masks, skulls, an occasional doll in close-up, still-life arrangements, and theatrical invented narratives to confront the viewer with a parody of the feminine. One of the earliest of these arrangements, Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death) (Plate 29) includes a few feminine accessories such as hats, shawls, and clothing that Ensor will recycle in different combinations in many works. At the center of this painting, a skull, surrounded by a white cloth that resembles a cloak, models a fashionable hat while another figure dons a pointed cap. Meanwhile, on either side, masks wrapped in fabric, one wearing a bow, and another with a peignoir, nightcap, and blue glasses, gather around, the informality of their arrangement reminiscent of friends going for a stroll. This constructed ensemble provides Ensor the opportunity to show off his ability to model form—even deceptive, unnatural ones like the masks—in natural light and to describe through this mélange of fabric and figure his skill at rendering tactile surfaces and patterns with ease. The painting’s disparate elements are tied together by a background plane that resembles a mirror, linking perception with the artifice of the studio. Simultaneously reflective and filled with deep space and hazy amorphous light, this background serves as an atmospheric backdrop for the invented scene of costumed performance that unfolds in the foreground. This mirror-like background also sets up several pictorial paradoxes, which allude to both display—the arrangement of desirable and fashionable things—and reflection. The latter aspect is reinforced by a small figure at the left who disrupts this background to suggest a space outside the painting’s frame. As this conflation of ways of seeing circulates through the painting, the mask and skeleton figures lose their spatial moorings, slipping back and forth between object and reflection, figure and ground, calling into question what is being seen while re-affirming that all that unfolds in this pictorial space is spectacle. The painting can also be understood as a mirror reflection, an illusion that keeps the eye circulating through its inverted, false, entirely artificial construction of fashionable commodities and studio props. Indeed, the painting’s obvious artifice combines with its grotesque absurdity to remind the viewer that the whole scenario is unfolding in an imaginary interior created in the artist’s studio where fantasy, invention, and free association join together to meditate on the meaning of modern experience. Mirroring the commodity of fashion and the artifice of art and life, dressed up and ready for public viewing, Ensor’s peculiar puppet-like figures, amalgams of cloth, skeleton, and mask, revel in the theatricality and abject conundrum of their display, even as they confront the public with a parodic performance of modern femininity.

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Attesting here to his interest in modern fashion and the aesthetics of display, aspects he had explored years earlier in his drawings copied from contemporary magazines and fashion journals, Ensor, rather than describe the modern woman, evokes her presence through fashion and presentation. Even if the fanciful assemblage of clothing and accessories in Masks Mocking Death takes place in the privacy of the artist’s studio, it refers to the public spaces of modern life and particularly to the spectacle culture circulating around woman and commodity, especially bourgeois woman and fashion. In the later nineteenth century, images of fashionable women could be found everywhere—in illustrated journals and fashion plates, on posters and publicité, in cartes de visite, and avant-garde art. With their attractive designs and sensuous arrangement of consumer goods, advertisements and department store displays provided visual support for this culture of commodity, endlessly reproducing the pleasure of looking and the desire for status on the walls, kiosks, and mirrored shop windows of the modern city. In Masks Mocking Death Ensor turns the allure of commodity display into a travesty. Signifiers of fashion and materialism—clothing, hats, and scarves, their tactile patterns and sensual, colorful shapes attractively laid out in natural light, are juxtaposed with skulls and masks—signs of artifice, decadence, and decay—simultaneously inviting and subverting the desire to look and acquire. Fabric and hats might adorn the face and body but, like makeup, they also seduce. Likewise, fashion accessories are about artifice, the ruse of the body immersed in the modern spectacle. As Baudelaire, whose essay on make-up promoted an ideal of feminine beauty based on trickery and extreme artifice, Ensor’s painted arrangements of clothes, fabric, masks, and the occasional skull ally the embellishments and seductions of the feminine with the deceptive staging of the material world in all its sexy, tempting array. In these works, Ensor presents his satirical parody by disassembling the modern woman into a fragmented display of fashion accessories. Neither evidence of his misanthropy nor directed at particular women, Ensor’s parody of the feminine instead appropriates contemporary patriarchal attitudes toward women to stage a burlesque satire of bourgeois values presented with a mordant and sarcastic wit, just as he had with his social critiques and satirical lampoons of modern Belgian life. Certainly, this is the case with The Intrigue (Plate 30), where a fashionably dressed woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat decorated with fabric and flowers and accompanied by a tophatted male companion leads a procession of puppet-like figures constructed out of amalgamations of fabric, masks, and skulls. The scene is lit from below as if on a stage, lending the whole a theatrical unreality. The woman’s face could be either a mask or just heavy makeup, but the frozen grimace of her rouge-painted mouth and turned-up nose signal snobbery and pretension. Although her face might be cosmetically enhanced, the man is clearly masked, the white paint and stylized features resembling the Noh masks sold in the Ensor family shop. Even as the woman’s eyes roll upward, adding an aspect of disdain to her expression, her arm bends to a right angle as the gloved hand touches the man’s yellow jacket like an Egyptian queen passing power to the king. At the very moment the woman’s hand takes hold, however, the man’s body moves in a different direction, their joined but separated forms conveying the distinct spatial and social spheres of the modern bourgeois couple. On either side, masked heads

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with sharply lit faces pop up at different angles to form a grotesque crowd consisting mainly of women ranging in age from a young girl with a cap holding a doll to the old woman at the left who resembles Old Woman with Masks of the previous year and even wears a similar floral crown. Just as this figure repeats the grin of the central woman, suggesting that she could be her mother, the mask to the right of the top-hatted man shares his arched eyebrows, angular eye slits, and white make-up. But unlike the man, and, in comparison to the child with the doll below who has similar features, this head with its rouged cheeks and lips is puffy and worn could be an older woman wearing too much makeup! Above this mask is another in profile that resembles a matronly figure with a veiled head whose bulging eyes and open mouth adds another disapproving look to the ensemble. On the left, three more masks complete this motley crew adding still more monstrous exaggerations including large or hooked noses, bulging eyes, and open mouths accented with red paint. Some of these figures grin (like the skull wearing a hat at the far right who echoes the frozen smile of the central woman), frown, or are contorted as if about to scream, their theatrically exaggerated facial expressions bringing to mind contemporary depictions of hysterics, degenerates, and drunks or those suffering from mental disease, all social miscreants with disorders then associated mainly with women. While the cloudy sky behind these masked figures might suggest an outdoor setting, the figures push forward, their forms compressed into the narrow foreground plane as if standing in front of a mirror. The background once again presents a mirror-like surface with a figure who looks out, engaging the viewer’s eye, while in the bottom right foreground, another head in profile becomes a repoussoir figure who looks upon the scene as if a stage performance. With masked faces and frozen expressions, Intrigue confronts the world outside its frame with an absurd satiric review of modern life performed by a preening, promenading crowd of bourgeois degenerates, several of whom are overly made-up fashionable modern women ready for their close-up. Ensor’s accent on fashion focuses on costumes and accessories. One such studio prop, a fancy hat with a red bow and trim possibly owned by his sister, can be found in numerous paintings: on the floor near the bed in Lady in Distress; on the central skull in Masks Mocking Death; worn by the shrewish woman in Astonishment of the Mask Wouse; and again by the woman who follows the drum major at the center of Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889; by a female puppet wielding a broom and holding a parasol in Skeletons Disputing a Hanged Man; and the woman at the center of Singular Masks, 1892 (Brussels, RMFAB). Ensor, it seems, found lady’s hats and particularly those adorned with ribbons, flowers or feathers appealing. He even wore a similar hat, trimmed with flowers and a feather in his Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat, and an all red version in Self-Portrait with Masks and again in Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Talking to Sophie Yoteko where he makes an appearance dressed as a woman. Shawls were another accessory: Mme. Wouse wears a red and green patterned shawl that is also found wrapped around the mask in Masks Mocking Death. Other paintings were accessorized with striped red and blue sateen cloth and peignoirs (Masks Mocking Death, Strange Masks, Pierrot’s Despair). Like the fans, gloves, and chinoiserie of his still-life paintings, the material culture and fashionable accouterments of a modern

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bourgeoisie lady offered Ensor a way to explore the expressive potential of the feminine sphere and women’s experience through engaging compositions filled with texture, patterns, and color. In other works, Ensor turns to strategies like cross-dressing in Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Speak with Sophie Yoteko (Plate 9) to satirize gender roles. In this painting, Ensor deploys wordplay and exaggeration, typical markers of travesty, to comically contrast feminine types. On one side, Mariette wearing a flat hat and high collared dress not unlike the one she wears in Ensor and General Leman Discussing Painting (Plate 8) offers Ernest Rousseau a flower while on the other side, Ensor wearing a dress, bonnet, and a shawl, makes a similar gesture. Mr. Rousseau stands at the center, unable to choose between these two “ladies.” While the comparison between these two women might cause Mr. Rousseau’s befuddlement, it also offers a sarcastic comment on the masculinized New Woman like those found in contemporary caricatures, only in Ensor’s painting, the woman is a man! Ensor uses a similar reversal in his 1893 painting The Call of the Siren (Figure 1.20) where he emerges from a bathhouse dressed in a bathing suit to the waiting arms of a woman. While, as discussed in Chapter 1, Ensor’s version obliquely references his family’s legal troubles and Van Beer’s lithographic postcard titled Shivering Woman, it can also be viewed as a satire of gender roles and the emancipated New Woman. With an obvious mustache and beard, a very feminine Ensor modestly covers his upper torso with his arms and steps gingerly down the steps. A woman, her hair pulled up into a severe bun and wearing a similar striped bathing costume that accentuates her bulging female body, stands nearby in the water, reaching out with her arms in the same pose as the van Beers work. Ensor playfully contrasts these two “women,” who, in the tradition of burlesque performance, invert and violate codes of expected gender behavior. Thus, an assertive woman acting more like a male seducer beckons an effeminate and reticent James performing the role of modest ingénue. No doubt Ensor was inspired by the topical revues then in their heyday in Brussels with male actors cross-dressing as women. One of the most popular, the comic trio of Milo, Ambreville, and Crommelynk, often performed satirical skits in drag, including in several plays written by Théo Hannon. Cross-dressing was also a regular trope of contemporary political caricatures that ridiculed Liberals and Socialists by dressing them in women’s clothing. For Ensor, as these two paintings reveal, the performance of contrary gender could be yet one more way to insert his satirical and transgressive self into the social narrative.

Available Models: The Woman with Blue Glasses and Marianne Female stock characters from the Commedia dell’arte also make cameo appearances in Ensor’s work. One of the most intriguing is a woman with glasses (usually blue), who wears a tall mob cap trimmed with a blue bow. She appears quite early, first seen in Ensor’s 1883 Scandalized Masks holding a flute-like club as she enters an interior and confronts a masked man seated at a table and reappears in the 1889 Astonishment of the Mask Wouse as a deflated body in a red jacket among the clothes piled on the floor. She

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can be seen in several other works including Christ’s Entry into Brussels, Masks Mocking Death, Attributes of Fine Arts (Attributes of the Studio) (1889, Munich, Bayerisch Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek), Skeletons Disputing a Hanged Man, and in the background of Skeleton in the Mirror (1890, Belgium, Private collection). With so many repeat performances in his work, this woman in a mob cap has special meaning for Ensor. Diane Lesko has suggested that she is a reference to Claire Lenoir, first published in 1867 and then re-printed in Tribulat Bonhomet in 1887 as part of Contes Cruels (Cruel Tales), by the Symbolist writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam whose central character wears blue spectacles.13 In Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir personifies the deceitful femme fatale whose glasses over sightless eyes reveal in death the reflection of her husband holding up the severed head of her dead sea captain lover. While hardly the tempting adulteress, Ensor’s woman with blue glasses might refer to the themes of introspection and subjective vision at the heart of de l’Isle Adam’s narrative. But as with the Old Woman with Masks, this figure, with her mob cap, masklike face, broad red lips, large bulbous nose, and round glasses, can also be considered a grotesque exaggeration of the feminine, a mocking inversion of the seductive fatal woman. Indeed, her lower body, rather than being exposed, is completely covered with a costume and, except for Scandalized Masks where she wears a dress and shawl, has no mass, dimension, or substance. Emptied out and apparently unseeing, she reappears in The Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, where she signifies lack and artifice: her head might be covered with a mob cap and her eyes hidden behind glasses, but her red jacket lies flat on the floor. Like the Mask Wouse who promenades into the set wearing a seemingly transparent dress, the woman with the cap and glasses is all puppet head, mask, and makeup. This woman with her mob cap and glasses could also be a personal but veiled reference to Ensor’s mother. Madame Ensor did wear glasses for reading as can be seen in several drawings and also occasionally covered her hair with a scarf or cloth, but in none of these does she wear anything resembling this pointed cap or the large round glasses worn by the figure in these paintings and drawing. Danielle DerreyCapon links this figure to a caricature of Philippe Thomassin by Jacques Callot and to other commedia dell’arte figures depicted by Callot who wear glasses as a sign of their short-sightedness.14 For Derrey-Capon, this woman can be associated with Ensor’s “dominating” mother in particular and generally with “all the authoritarian and emasculating women of the family.”15 This interpretation regards Scandalized Masks as autobiographical psychodrama, that is, as a depiction of Ensor’s mother and drunken father, but does not take into account Ensor’s inclusion of this enigmatic figure in other works, where this woman with her cap and glasses, while perhaps linked to family circumstance, could also be read as a broader parody of the petite bourgeois woman. The connection between glasses, blindness, and assertive behavior in some of Ensor’s representations of this figure also brings to mind contemporary satiric representations of Marie Popelin, who is portrayed in one caricature arguing before the court wearing glasses and a hatpin in her lawyer’s cap while her husband is seen in the background at home taking care of the baby (Figure 4.14). As this caricature implies, women (with glasses) seeking access to institutions of power (as Popelin had

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Figure 4.14  Pippaff, “La Femme-Avocat,” Le Tirailleur, October 7, 1888, lithograph illustration (photo: © KRB, Brussels)

been in trying to become Belgium’s first woman lawyer) could only be ridiculed as unfeminine and emasculating, and, by serving as a lawyer in a public court, absent from her marital duties. In other of artworks, the woman with the mob cap and glasses seems more pedestrian and mundane, in other words, more petite bourgeois, especially when the cap with its bow is compared to the more fashionable hats and accessories included on other works. This figure also has ties with the lower classes as suggested by a drawing from his sketchbook depicting a peasant woman wearing a cap and round glasses (Ostend Mu.ZEE, Inv. 1973/670). Tellingly, women wearing bonnets also appear frequently in contemporary caricatures lampooning working-class and petite bourgeois types. One such bonneted woman who made frequent appearances in Belgian caricatures of the mid-1880s is Mme. Pipelet, the concierge/porter character from Eugène Sue’s 1843 book, The Mysteries of Paris. In conservative Belgian caricatures, she is depicted as a shrewish gossipmonger often holding a broom who protects Liberal causes against the prying eyes of the Catholics (Figure 4.15). Mme. Pipelet makes a cameo appearance in Ensor’s Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man (Figure 3.8) where, as a puppet-like figure on the right holding a broom and umbrella, she reprises her role as an embattled concierge. Behind her, another bespectacled and bonneted woman can be seen in the door in the background. Melancholy Fishwives (1892, Belgium, Private collection, on depot Ghent, MSK) reprises these two women with bonnets, now as lower-class fisherman’s wives wearing long black capes that cover their plain dresses and long aprons. Seated indoors in Ensor’s studio, the two fishwives, their features less exaggerated than the bonneted women in Christ’s Entry, look directly out at the viewer, their intimidating presence relieved only by the burlesque addition of three skulls in a background window. A

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The Social Context of James Ensor’s Art Practice Figure 4.15  D. Naniez. “Les Chiennes d’Enfer Guidées par M’ame Pipelet (affair Vander Smissen),” Le Patriote illustré, October 17, 1886, lithograph illustration, Antwerp Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience B 70783 (photo: Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, Antwerp)

sign in this window adds a mordant epitaph: “To Death! They Have Eaten Too Much Fish” (A Mort! Elles ont mangé trop de poisson) that sarcastically comments on the women’s confrontational gaze and their stereotypic roles as gossiping old women. Yet, once again Ensor’s representation of the working class is nuanced. He appears to be mocking these women, but, their prominent and more realistic representation as well as the directness of his description and careful attention to detail conveys respect that differs from the artifice and fashion seen in his depictions of bourgeois women. Unlike contemporary writers and theorists, such as Gustave LeBon, who saw the working-class women as instigators of violence and prone to hysteria or degeneracy, Ensor’s representation of lower-class women can be sympathetic and at times even heroic. Often these working-class women are depicted as mothers protecting the children, such as his 1887 drawing Triumph of Death (formerly collection Antwerp, KMSKA) where a bare-breasted woman runs from a scythe-wielding skeleton as another woman dressed in a coat and hat prays next to her. Interestingly, these two women are prominently featured in the foreground of a large crowd made up mostly of men. Above them, on a balcony and in a window at the left, Ensor provides examples of their immoral sisters: nude prostitutes who ignore the fleeing crowd below as they cavort with men even as skeletons approach. In The Strike (Plate 21) of the following year, Ostend fisherwomen play a significant role, protesting and resisting the civil guard, their positions and gestures repeating those of the rioting and striking men,

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reinforcing the scene’s intensity and presenting them as active and equal participants in the strike. Women can be seen vomiting or gesturing at the soldiers, holding their ground while being attacked by the gendarmes, acting as witnesses to the violence, and at the center becoming a pregnant victim of police brutality. Ensor repeated this image of the noble working-class mother in his other rendition of this same event, the 1892 painting Les Gendarmes (Figure 3.15) where in background an older woman wearing a bonnet and shawl stands in the doorway as a soldier raises his rifle. She maintains her role as a witness while also creating a contrast to the nun in the foreground who closes her eyes and prays. Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (Plate 22) is perhaps the most direct in its representation of the heroic workingclass woman. In this drawing, women are both participants in the protest and most prominent victims. On the right, a woman holds a child as she flees the attacking civil guard, another, wearing a white bonnet, prays as a soldier aims a pistol at her head while another woman, shot in the chest, falls backward. As this drawing makes clear, working-class women are the true revolutionaries, willing to die for the social causes of the protesting crowd. In comparison to the women of the noble working class, the woman with her cap and glasses provides a more satirical look at bourgeois pretension and feminine artifice. Her companion of sorts is the revolutionary Marianne, whom Ensor depicts in numerous works with her characteristic red Phrygian cap. In 1880s Belgium, Marianne and especially her red Phrygian cap conveyed different messages depending on one’s political persuasion. Even if the Phrygian cap had been a constant and significant attribute of Liberty, as Maurice Agulhon has shown, by the late 1870s, Marianne had become associated with an ardent and radical populism and questions arose as to whether crowning a female allegory with this cap would best represent the virtues of liberty and the French Republic.16 With or without her cap, Marianne continued to be aligned with the revolutionary anarchy of the French Commune and with more radicalized workers, especially those of southern France who bore busts of Marianne or wore red caps at their rallies. As the subject of both political idolatry and caricature, the inclusion of Marianne’s familiar image with her Phrygian cap could be both confrontational and controversial. In his representations of Marianne, Ensor tends to exaggerate her red bonnet, underscoring even further her affiliation with the French Commune, Socialism, workers, radical individualism, and sedition. But if Marianne embodies the French Revolution and leftist ideology, her act of kissing also implies seduction, an aspect that can convey different meanings according to the context. In Christ’s Entry into Brussels, Marianne’s kissing embrace is set against the backdrop of a broad Brussels boulevard filled with military bands, religious figures, top-hatted bourgeois, clowns, Pierrots, workers, and many masks. Taking place under the banner “Vive la Sociale ” hailing the urban proletariat, Marianne’s kiss, as the startled expression on her companion’s face makes clear, signals liberation from conformity and bourgeois values, especially the “doctrinaire” policies of the conservative wing of Belgium’s Liberal Party sarcastically lampooned by the placard above her head that reads “Doctrinaire Fanfares always Succeed.” This idea of Marianne as a symbol of liberty and freedom from convention is even more apparent in Baths of Ostend where she participates enthusiastically as part

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of a couple in a very public act of kissing whose placement in the foreground is hard to miss. Marianne’s kiss—one could call it public exhibitionism as compared to the more typically middle-class couples who fill in the foreground—gives way to the even more exuberant acts of sexuality in the liberating waters just beyond her. But if Ensor’s kissing Marianne stands in these works for public provocation and individual freedom from social convention, her representation and libertine act also moves her away from her more heroic and revolutionary origins and instead reinforces her later affiliation with promiscuity, the lower classes, and moral decline. While these aspects are seen most often in conservative caricatures, even the poet Paul Verlaine, the former Communard turned reactionary Catholic described Marianne in an 1881 poem: Marianne is very old, getting on for a hundred. In the flower of her youth she was a bold young hussy, Drinking and loving, her nights spent in the arms of soldiers, But now she is a garrulous crone with thin hair and no teeth.17

In The Gendarmes, Marianne with her red Phrygian cap is no longer allied with Socialism and radical workers, nor does her kiss embody the hedonistic and radical spirit of Mardi Gras and revolutionary individualism. Instead, Marianne embraces a judge, thus prostituting herself to the government, her symbolic denouement countered by the focus on the room with its heroic image of working-class fishermen who give their lives in the fight for individual rights. In the print version, Ensor further underscores the irony of Marianne’s lost radicalism by hand-coloring her bonnet in red.

The Divine Feminine: Virgins, Angels, and Saints While the assertive and promiscuous Marianne fades into duplicity, becoming in The Gendarmes a kissing fool who distracts Justice from the worker’s cause, The Virgin of Consolation (Plate 31), painted the same year, pays respect to her opposite—the maternal, virginal Mary, the spiritual woman. Unlike his social satires which featured exaggerated caricatures and packed compositions, The Virgin of Consolation is painted in a flat, linear manner with all the principal figures placed in the middle ground. At the left, Mary, wearing a multi-starred crown and holding a lily, stands in profile on a carpet of flowers. Ensor kneels on a red carpet in supplication opposite her, one hand raised as if giving a blessing. Another representation of Mary as a mother nursing the infant Jesus appears as a tondo painting on the easel between them. The Virgin’s delicate features and blond hair highlighted by a white flat halo evoke the decorative, idealized representations of Mary found in illuminated manuscripts and medieval stain glass windows, her gently swaying form, tiny hands, and the overlapping folds and patterns of her dress imitating the international style of high gothic statuary. Perpetuating the painting’s medievalist ambiance, the surrounding white ground, archways, and columns evoke the closed, almost hermetic interior of a

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church or convent even as the flower carpet and blue window-like opening at the top of the painting allude to the enclosed garden symbolic of Mary’s virginity. Ensor’s representation of Mary as queen, mother, and virgin in The Virgin of Consolation points to the influential position that the Virgin Mary held in nineteenthcentury social and cultural discourse. Earlier in the century Mary had rivaled Marianne as a symbol of the Republic, but in later decades as Marianne became identified more with the radicalized working class and the profane, sexualized woman, the Virgin Mary came to embody the divine feminine, an ideal of female behavior that would serve as a model for both women and girls. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Marian devotion had achieved cult status due mainly to the six apparitions of the Virgin Mary, all eventually sanctioned by the Catholic Church, reported in France between 1830 and 1876, with the most famous one the visitation to the shepherdess Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858. Bernadette’s eighteen visions and miraculous healings supported Catholic iconography and pedagogy, providing a “faith-based” model for women to follow and inspiring hundreds of thousands to make annual visits to the shrine built at Lourdes in Mary’s honor. Mary’s self-declaration of her Immaculate Conception in her sixteenth apparition to Bernadette appeared to give heavenly approval to the dogma of Immaculate Conception proclaimed four years earlier by Pope Pius IX. This Catholic belief that Mary from the instant of her birth was free from the stain of original sin, coupled with the increasing numbers of ecstatic sightings and miracles attributed to the Virgin, promoted Marian devotion even more as did campaigns to encourage women to imitate the Virgin in all aspects of their lives. Devotions, including special prayers and retreats dedicated to Mary’s virtues, and women’s magazines, guides, and other popular publications urged devout women to follow Mary’s example of virtuous maternity and virginity.18 The Catholic dogmas of the Immaculate Conception, Annunciation, and Perpetual Virginity reinforced the autonomy of Mary’s decision to remain a virgin while advancing as infallible the belief in her sinless conception and saintly motherhood. Embodying then the same virtues that restricted women to the domestic sphere rather than public spaces—the very places that by the end of the century would be challenged by the feminism of the New Woman—the Virgin Mary furnished, and Marian devotion advanced, a nonsexual, maternal, and morally superior feminine ideal, one that coexisted with and also counteracted the more materialistic and sexually available femme fatale. In the Virgin of Consolation, Ensor, representing himself as an artist holding a palette and brushes, bows before Mary, the embodiment of the sacred feminine. In front of other Ensor self-references including a herring, a maulstick, more brushes, and a carrot can be seen. Acknowledging his occupation and joining his self-portrait with that of the Virgin Mary, Ensor’s painting recalls Flemish representations of Saint Luke painting the Virgin, in particular Rogier van der Weyden’s version (c.1435–40, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts)—thought to be a self-portrait of Van der Weyden—that Ensor may have seen reproduced in a contemporary journal. Ensor’s depiction of a nursing Mary on the easel appears to also be a reference to Van der Weyden’s image of the Virgin with Christ as does his placement of the artist kneeling opposite the Virgin. Virgin of Consolation changes, however, the traditional representation of this subject

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of the patron saint of artists painting Mary with her child. Instead, Ensor describes the moment when the finished work on the easel of a nursing Madonna is presented. Ensor also changes from the brunette described in Bernadette’s vision to a fair and blond Virgin Mary who resembles a Flemish maiden. The Virgin in Ensor’s representation serves then both as artist’s muse and inspirational model of motherhood. As he pays homage to the sacred feminine Virgin Mary, Ensor’s kneeling body is so thinly painted that it appears to float above the underlying red ground. A large paintcovered palette held in his left hand covers Ensor’s lower body like a shield, while the brush positioned near the groin suggests a deflated phallus, coupling Ensor and the divine feminine, represented by Mary, with sexual performance and masculinity. As Carol Herringer has shown, nineteenth-century debates over the Catholic Virgin Mary and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception shed light on Victorian attitudes toward sin and the body, sexual intercourse, and masculinity, affirming and defining social and gender roles for both men and women.19 Ensor’s coupling of his artistic identity with manliness and Marian devotion was not at all unusual as Mary’s attributes of virginity, maternity, and spirituality, the same ones presented in Virgin of Consolation, along with her position as an intermediary to divine authority, are all intimately linked to contemporary patriarchal prescriptions for the social roles of both men and women. Ensor’s representations of Joan of Arc also embrace the same pious and spiritual ideal of woman as Virgin of Consolation. An 1888 drawing (Belgium, Private collection) depicts this Christian saint in profile dressed in armor, looking heroically noble and contemporary, as soldiers advance behind her. A mixed media work of 1892, The Torture of Joan of Arc (Belgium, Private collection) focuses attention on Joan of Arc, dressed in medieval clothing and surrounded by a crowd, as she is set on fire in a medieval square. Like other nineteenth-century images of the allegorical Liberty and the revolutionary Marianne, Joan of Arc is viewed frontally, seminude atop a pyre and tied to a post with the label “Sorcerer” affixed to it. As flames swirl, the saint’s half-clothed body and exposed breasts offer the crowd (as well as the viewer) the mesmerizing spectacle of virginal sacrifice and public execution even as the saint’s composed pose and steady gaze refute the pain of such a horrific death. Like the image of Christ, Ensor’s Joan of Arc becomes a martyr associated with suffering and self-sacrifice, another emblematic image of the sacred feminine. Though Ensor accents Joan of Arc’s stoic stance, implying that physical torture will end in spiritual transcendence, like other nineteenth-century artists, he also instills this representation of the Maid (of Orleans and Lorraine) with social and political meaning. Depictions of Joan of Arc in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ignored the historical record of her trial and actual appearance, especially Joan’s short-cropped hair and cross-dressing in male attire—unconventional traits adopted for self-protection that contributed to her final condemnation and execution—for representations that depicted her in feminine dress and long hair.20 Indeed, the way Joan of Arc’s gendered body was denoted, in particular, her dress, hairstyle, and sexual life, came to embody current political ideology as she was recast over the century into a monarchist, a nationalist, a fervent Catholic, and an obedient peasant girl. After the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, Joan of Arc, the heroine of Lorraine, acquired new symbolic meaning in relation to the loss of this

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region and French nationalism with numerous sculptures and paintings of her on view in the French Salons throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Most notable of these was Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (1879, New York, Metropolitan Museum), whose depiction returned the Maid to her humble peasant origins as a French farm girl hearing voices. Ensor was drawn to Bastien-Lepage’s painting, even copying it into his sketchbook (Antwerp, KMSKA 2711/155b), most likely when it was on view at the 1880 Ghent Trienniale Salon. Ensor’s painting The Torture of Joan of Arc follows historical precedent and also departs from it. Like other artists, he depicts a long-haired Maid of Lorraine without armor and wearing womanly clothing, her simple white skirt and bare feet highlighting the saint’s humility and femininity. At the same time, Joan of Arc’s bared breasts can be associated with Ensor’s representation of Marianne and allegorical images of Liberty even as the saint’s exposed body also suggests violation. In stark contrast to this bared body, the soldiers surrounding the pyre wear decorative breastplates and helmets topped with feathers. The soldiers and townsfolk gather in a medieval town square surrounded by guildhalls like those found in many Belgian towns but neither priests nor delegates of the Catholic Church, commonly seen in many representations of the execution, are present. Moving away from the mainly French iconography of heroic nationalism and situating the story of her life closer to home, Ensor portrays Joan of Arc as a vulnerable woman whose intransigent defiance and torturous death before her captors championed female strength, wisdom, and bravery, as well as the spirit of nonconformity, freedom, and individualism that coupled the secular and spiritual with the feminine. In this aspect, Ensor’s representation is similar to that of the historian Jules Michelet who de-emphasized the religious and mystical aspects of Joan of Arc’s life to celebrate her as a Christ-like secular martyr, whose selfless virtue and self-sacrifice saved France.21 Rather than an emblem of French patriotism or an example of devotional religious fervor, Ensor’s depiction of Joan of Arc relates instead to his native Belgium and to contemporary concerns, including recent discussions by Verhaeren, Demolder, and others on the need to develop a collective social model grounded in Belgium’s medieval past. While these narratives circulate in Ensor’s treatment, Joan of Arc’s story of persistence in pursuit of her goals and belief in herself also finds parallels in Ensor’s own quest for artistic success and acceptance. Like the Virgin of Consolation also painted in 1892, Ensor pays homage in the Torture of Joan of Arc to a woman whose representation was meant to inspire fascination, respect, and perseverance.

Ensor’s Women (Really) As the above discussion and earlier chapters make clear, the representation of women was a major part of Ensor’s practice, beginning with his early depictions of bourgeois life and continuing throughout his career in artwork that included both direct and sympathetic depictions of women’s lives and imagery that sustained nineteenth-century stereotypes. At the same time he is producing these works and developing his art practice, some of his most important relationships are

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with women who, as mentors, collectors and patrons, assistants, and writers, are supportive of his career. As discussed in Chapter 2, Ensor’s early portraits of the women in his family are respectful exercises by a young artist in search of available models to develop his technique and observational skills. Set indoors at home in Ostend, these direct but formally posed portraits employed clothing, lighting, and décor to accent a gentile domesticity and the family’s middle-class status. The pleasant interior settings and especially Mitche’s stylish attire in a number of these paintings reinforce the impression that these women live a comfortable, proper bourgeoisie life, even though, as noted in Chapter 2, the works, made only a few years after a very public bankruptcy, make little reference to the family’s financial difficulties. Like his representations of the family salon and his paintings of well-dressed but singular women (with Mitche often serving as the model), these family portraits are all about propriety, position, and place, that is, their social roles and the expectations and priorities that shape their daily lives. While these formal portraits demonstrate the family’s social aspirations and respectability, Ensor’s more informal sketches detail the unguarded and intimate moments of everyday life at home. Unvarnished, sometimes overstated, at times playful and humorous, these drawings provide a more informal view that elucidates the discrepancy between the women’s more public social role and the tedium of their private life indoors, as evidenced most notably by Ensor’s numerous sketches of his mother, sister, or aunt asleep. If some of these drawings bind the women to these interiors, embodying through the melding of bodies and space, the values of materialism and domesticity, others articulate Ensor’s critique of the diminished expectations and mundane lives of petite bourgeois women. Most often this criticism is directed at Aunt Mimi, an able businesswoman who in addition to managing her own souvenir shop in Blankenberge, took over the Ensor family shop after the bankruptcy and, as noted in Chapter 2, kept the family afloat afterward by taking care of the finances and providing furnishings for their rented house. As a strong-willed, independent woman who replaced Ensor’s father in authority and position, Aunt Mimi, as noted earlier, was the subject of Ensor’s fantasy and rebuke in the rather stern and foreboding Surly Countenance. A comment perhaps on Aunt Mimi’s dominating presence in the Ensor household, Surly Countenance reprises the devices of artifice and grotesque distortion found in his parodies of the feminine like Masks Mocking Death and Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, to present a caricatural portrait of the professional woman. Unlike her mother and aunt, Mitche, Ensor’s model in many of his early interior scenes, epitomizes the modern woman who in early paintings can be seen wearing fashionable clothes, holding a fan, having tea, sewing, reading, and often sitting alone or simply waiting. Drawn from observation and saturated in light following the prescriptions of realist painting, these paintings proclaim the significance of the feminine sphere. We are invited into the dining room in The Oyster Eater to watch Mitche enthusiastically consume her meal in a swirl of light and color that underscores all the sensual and pleasurable aspects of the modern experience. In Lady in Distress she sinks, dark and nearly unnoticeable, into a bed in a darkened corner, the drawn curtains and diffused light allowing the oppressive atmosphere to envelop her reclining body. If in some drawings Mitche sleeps or sews, more often she is not tied to the tired

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malaise of the shopkeeper’s life like her mother and aunt, but instead is described as a literate and creative woman. In Woman Writing a Letter, Mitche (Ostende, Mu.ZEE), seated at a table with her head bowed, concentrates on her task which, despite the title, could just as easily be her making a drawing as writing a letter. Other drawings portray Mitche reading (1887, Belgium, Private collection) and in A Colorist she is glimpsed in the corner of her brother’s studio painting a fan, an endeavor that, as discussed earlier, provided young women like Mitche the opportunity to paint and also be productive. If Ensor’s paintings and drawings of a young Mitche describe women’s experience as embodied by fashion and femininity, Mariette Rousseau represents a more independent New Woman, even if that label was not yet in use when Ensor first met her in the early 1880s. Multilingual, educated—despite no access to the university—and active in her own career as a mycologist with research and numerous publications, Mme. Rousseau also organized and played an active role in weekly salons where mostly male colleagues gathered to discuss and debate current issues. Ensor’s 1889 portrait (Knokke-Heist, Private collection) recognizes Mariette’s independence and her dual roles as scholar and mother by including both a microscope and an image of a nursing Virgin Mary, alluding in this manner to her support and spiritual role as his muse. While this drawing testifies to their friendship, as noted in the last chapter, Ensor’s admiration did not prevent him from including her in his satiric parodies of the middle class. As a tourist at the seashore in Ensor’s sarcastic Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around (Plate 23), Mariette sits on a bench taking in the healthy airs of the North Sea where she and her companions typify the vacationing bourgeois who supported the family shop in Ostend. Presenting his humorous, albeit ambiguous perspective of this co-dependent relationship between tourists and locals, Ensor’s situates two fashionable but oblivious women (Mariette and Mitche) amid a polluted environment, one that they as wealthy vacationers help contaminate. Mariette becomes even more of a caricature in her role as bemused mediator between Ensor and General Leman in his burlesque satire Ensor and General Leman Discuss Painting (Plate 8). Rolling her eyes, her body and face reduced to a cartoon-like outline, Mariette becomes a woman caught in the middle. Unimpressed it seems by this display of combative masculinity, Mme. Rousseau leans to the side, her arch expression and even demeanor showing no indication as to whom is more manly or might be favored in this mock debate between artistic creativity and military might. As these portraits make clear, caricature and parody allow Ensor to articulate, often in a humorous way, his discomfort and possible sexual anxiety around strong and independent women, even those like Mme. Rousseau whom he admired. The Comical Smokers (Plate 32), another painting that mixes portraiture with satire, Ensor’s friend and possible companion Augusta Boogaerts is depicted as a New Woman. Wearing a fashionable short skirt that shows off her legs and a broad-brimmed hat with a feather, Augusta sits in a room smoking a cigarette while being waited on by the Dutch painter Willem Paerels (1872–1962). Since the late nineteenth century, the image of a woman smoking had been tied to bohemian culture, degeneracy, and increasingly at the end of the century with the emancipated New Woman.22 Smoking was considered unfeminine and inappropriate for proper bourgeois women as it was

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associated with the working class and seductive, uncontrolled female sexuality. But smoking a rolled cigarette was exactly the kind of assertive, more masculine display that independent women might do in public to flaunt social convention and strict gender roles. In 1920 when Ensor painted this portrait, fashionable middle-class women smoked cigarettes to show how modern they were and to proclaim their new social and political independence. While Boogaerts displays her cigarette and thus her status as a fashionable New Woman in Ensor’s portrait, her assertive presence is countered by references to patriarchal privilege, feminine artifice, and deviant behavior. Paerels serves her with a platter, but one where a skull smoking a rather phallic cigar that references the biblical story of St. John the Baptist, with Augusta playing perhaps the role of a modern-day Salomé. On the floor behind them another skull, sucking on a pipe, appears to leer at Augusta. Other pipe smokers rendered as stick figures—the same graffiti figures that Ensor had used in his print The Pisser (seen hanging on the wall) to satirize patriarchal authority—look out from the wallpaper with mocking disregard. Even if cigarettes had been usurped by women, cigars and pipes remained linked with men and smoking rooms. Seated with her cigarette in this masculinized interior, Augusta oversteps her femininity whose ideal attributes are symbolized by the carnations and lilies in the vase in the foreground. Boogaerts might be a modern, emancipated woman but as Ensor signals through his inclusion of the painting Old Woman with Masks and etching of The Pisser on the wall behind her, fashionable smoking is both artificial and base. Ensor’s moralizing tone extends to her pose which is reminiscent of images of wayward, smoking women popular with seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Ensor’s own self-portrait in the background articulates his own ambivalence toward Boogaerts who, by the time he paints this work, had become his studio manager, assisting with his art practice in many ways including carrying his plates to the printer, arranging still-life compositions, and promoting and selling his work. In other words, she aided and nurtured his career just as Mariette Rousseau had done earlier. Ensor’s inclusion then of The Pisser, a veiled portrait of the artist (missing the words “Ensor is a fool” in the original print), and Old Lady with Masks which, as noted above, began as a portrait and became a satire on beauty, also allude to Augusta’s supportive role. Yet even as this representation seems to moralize and disapprove of Boogaerts modern femininity trespassing in this masculine domain, it remains a humorous even playful critique as Augusta smiles and triumphantly holds up her cigarette for all to see. Augusta Boogaerts no doubt enjoyed this portrait as it remained in her collection along with several other portraits of her as a fashionable, bourgeois woman. In Our Two Portraits (c.1905, United States, Private collection) Augusta is seated in a room holding a flower, an allusion to her femininity. Other flowers are strewn on the floor, with more in the vase on the table and her hat as well as on the rug in the mirror. Dressed in a long dark skirt and jacket, a fur stole on her lap and wearing a broad flower-garnished hat as if on a social visit, she assumes a rather informal, even casual, pose with her hand draped over the back of the chair. Ensor, seen in the background as a reflection in the armoire mirror, presents himself as a well-dressed bourgeois gentleman seated at a table as if outdoors at a café. Although centrally posed, Boogaerts looks away, seemingly unaware of the viewer who is also the artist, and his intimate,

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even proprietary gaze from the position both in the mirror and outside the frame. Linked by the mirror that reflects Boogaerts’s outline, this double portrait juxtaposes social properness with a rather private view of this unconventional relationship. Ensor’s other portraits of Augusta also emphasize her middle-class respectability. Seated Portrait of Augusta Boogaerts or La Sirène (c.1930 Belgium, Private collection) depicts Boogaerts, again seated in an interior, holding a fan and fashionably dressed in a lace blouse, skirt, and white shoes similar to those she wore in The Comical Smokers. The composition is similar to Our Two Portraits only now Boogaerts looks off to the right instead of the left, and, rather than in a mirror, Ensor makes an appearance via the works that surround her head beginning with his portrait of his mother, My Dead Mother, on the far left, next to Ensor and General Leman Discussing Painting and on the right his portrait of Ernest Rousseau. Interestingly, Augusta’s head, placed between his representations of the Rousseaus, overlaps Ensor’s body in Ensor and General Leman Discussing Painting. Included then with his mother and Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, all who played significant roles in his life, this portrait alludes to Augusta’s support for his art career. As well, even though Ensor made this portrait in 1930 when Boogaerts is sixty years old, he paints her as a much younger woman. Two later portraits, Resting in the Studio (1938, Belgium, Private collection) are similar: in one, Augusta reclines on a couch near a stuffed red devil doll surrounded by several of Ensor’s works including Christ’s Entry into Brussels, and in the later Portrait of Augusta Boogaerts (1939, Belgium, Private collection), she is surrounded by several loosely painted figures. In addition to his representations of Augusta Boogaerts, Ensor painted numerous portraits of women, some of whom were his friends and supporters, and others who were married to men who were his patrons. All these portraits accent the women’s status through costume and pose. Only rarely does he represent them as accomplished or professional women. These paintings include The Lady in Blue (Portrait of Madame Duhot) (1906, Belgium, Private collection) a commissioned portrait; Portrait of Madeline Lambotte (The Lady with a Straw Hat) (1909, Belgium, Private collection) which depicts the niece of Doctor Albin and Emma Lambotte in Ensor’s studio with one of his paintings (Christ Walking on Water, 1885) in the background and several masks on the floor; Portrait of Madame Albert Croquez 1927 (United States, Private collection), painted from a photograph and another Mona Lisa among the Masks (1934, United States, Private collection) where Mme. Croquez holds a flower and is similarly surrounded by masks like the earlier painting Old Woman with Masks; a portrait of his niece, Alexandrine Daveluy (1927, Belgium, Private collection); and the poet Claude Bernières (1939, Private collection) surrounded by seashells and two nudes who crown her with a laurel wreath. Among this group, his representation of Suzanne Van Damme (Painters Getting to Grips 1938, Private collection) is unusual in that it depicts a woman artist in the act of painting and also serves as a double portrait with Ensor that points to his influence on her early work. A portrait of Emma Lambotte 1907 (Belgium, Private collection) uses similar conventions. Centrally seated and wearing a hat and a dress, and a shawl fastened with clasps and embellished with a gold chain, Mme. Lambotte looks out directly and confidently with one hand on her hip and the other resting on a ceramic figurine. In this painting, Ensor alludes to Lambotte’s work as a writer—she wrote for the weekly

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Antwerp magazines Méphisto and Le Tout-Liège and published several volumes of poetry—by including a book on the table next to her. As collectors, Lambotte and her husband purchased a number of Ensor’s paintings including Children at Their Morning Toilette and The Oyster Eater, a painting that they would eventually sell to the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts. Yet Ensor does not depict Emma with paintings by Ensor that she owned, but two other works, At the Conservatory and Scandalized Masks, that refer to her role as an art critic. Seated formally but fashionably in front of the viewer, she is contrasted on the left to Ensor’s painted parody of Wagner that includes recognizable but exaggerated portraits of two women opera singers. On the other side, the woman with the blue glasses and mob cap can be seen over Lambotte’s shoulder. While these painting humorously satirize women, Lambotte is represented as both a poised professional writer and a modern, bourgeois woman. As this chapter has shown, Ensor’s representation of women is both complex and confounding, ranging from admiring homages and sympathetic views of women in domestic interiors, to portrayals of the sacred muse and the divine feminine of Mary and Joan of Arc, as well as images of destructive femme fatales, profane nudes, the revolutionary Marianne, and women of artifice, cosmetics and fashion. But rather than simply dismissive of women or reductively misogynist, these images in all their diversity and knottiness speak to an artist who is experiencing and confronting his modern experience and especially the role women played in it. Circulating in these works are fin de siècle anxieties about women and their bodies in public and private spaces, current debates over morality, religion, and science, the clash of values engendered by the materialism and the pretense of a capitalist commodity, the struggle within the middle class for power, acceptance, and visibility, and social constructions of femininity and masculinity. Of course, Ensor’s debt to women is not only as a muse and stand-in for modernity. Indeed the family home in Ostend, sustained by women and a place he never left, inspired his creativity while supporting him with studio space and art materials, available models, and subjects for his paintings. Interestingly, despite his representations linking the women in his family to domesticity and material possessions—the outward signs of bourgeois respectability—the family and especially the Ensor women did not always conform to middle-class conventionality. Ensor’s father hardly worked. His aunt, an enterprising businesswoman, never married, nor did his mother remarry after Ensor Sr.’s death even though many widows did. Mitche was married briefly to legitimatize her child Alexandrine (Jeanne Taen Hee Tseu Daveluy 1893–1966) but after giving birth and living for a brief time in Germany, she left her husband and returned to Ostend to live with her family who in turn raised Alex. Mitche Ensor never married again and lived the rest of her life with her brother, mother, and aunt. Similarly, Ensor’s relationships with other women were unconventional even if his life-long bachelorhood was not unusual for men of his class. His decades-long relationship with Augusta Boogaerts transgressed middle-class propriety as women of Boogaerts’s class were expected to marry, raise a family, and continue to support the family by working. Not only did Ensor and Boogaerts not marry, but also their association appears to have been mostly nonsexual and often business-like, especially after the turn of the century. Likewise, Ensor’s friendships with Mariette Rousseau and Emma Lambotte were platonic and

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supportive. These intelligent and creative women provided Ensor with sympathetic role models of women who had careers, despite societal restrictions on their gender. Even if he may have parodied the New Woman in The Comical Smokers, he nevertheless enjoyed the support, encouragement, and patronage of these modern “new” women throughout his long career. Despite this patronage and the perceptive portraits that he made of the women in his life, as the poem that began this chapter makes clear, Ensor’s relationship with and representation of women was not fixed and often contrary. Women played an important role in his work, serving as models for his evocative portrayal of modern life and the social dynamic of the petit-bourgeois family. Inspired by and even selfidentifying with the feminine sphere of the domestic interior, Ensor often cast an empathetic look at the social spaces occupied by women in sympathetic portrayals of the less explored, often subjective experiences of women’s daily lives. Yet these sensitive depictions are countered in other works by negative images of women that suggest a more chauvinistic perspective as seen, for example, in exaggerated caricatures, scenes of violence and assault, and images of women as naked, monstrous grotesques and vindictive torturers. Ensor may pay homage in some works to the ideal woman as represented by the Virgin Mary but just as often he portrays women as femme fatales or the made-up and masked embodiments of artifice, deceit, and perverse sexuality. Shaped and sustained by the changing cultural and political attitudes of his time, these representations mark Ensor’s engagement with and difference from his fin de siècle contemporaries. At the same time, the aggressive and cruel aspect of some of his depictions raises questions as does his unmarried status, lifelong bachelorhood, and unconventional relationships as to the nature of Ensor’s own sexual identity and how it may have shaped these representations of women. Most scholars assume that Ensor’s sexual preferences subscribe to the cultural norms of heterosexuality. His “unrequited love” for Mariette Rousseau is often mentioned as is the family disapproval that kept him from marrying Augusta Boogaerts. Even his supposed creative decline has been attributed to a loss of virility and castration complex, the psychological consequences of his inability to become a father. While his portraits of family members and female colleagues are usually respectful, if at times humorous and satirical, his depiction of the sexualized female body was more aberrant, often base, scatological, and intimated violence and sexual assault. Ensor reveals his distaste for the carnal female body in several works including an etching of a brothel scene, The Old Rascals, 1895 (T. 101, D. 101, Cr. 102, E.104) and the grotesquely monstrous women that surround St. Anthony in The Temptation of St. Anthony. Lust (T.125, E. 130) from his 1903–1904 series Seven Deadly Sins links the naked female body with witchcraft and women’s sexual organs in The Wizard’s Squall, while the deviant creatures in The Temptation of St. Anthony flatulently give birth to animals. The phallus, however, is often associated with creativity, dissent, and spirituality, as seen for example in the phallic brushes accompanying his selfportrait in the Virgin of Consolation, the cannon he aims at General Leman in Ensor and Leman Discussing Painting, as well as the intimation of lack in Christ Mourned by Angels. Ensor’s understanding of female anatomy may be limited and possibly drawn from semi-pornographic sources, but he does not shy away from sexual innuendo.

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Exposed buttocks (both female and male) make frequent appearances in his images, sometimes as flagrant rumps about to be penetrated. Indeed, the libidinous sea of Baths of Ostend (Plate 27) is filled with many buttocks. Similarly, a group of bent over figures reveal their posteriors as they confront and collectively moon the public in the 1889 etching Destroying Angel (T. 77). Ensor’s sexually transgressive and often scatological subtext is especially evident in marginalia details: men piss from cathedrals, towers, and balloons, and occasionally into the mouths of others; in The Strike figures excrete from windows or onto crowds as had the representatives of Church and State in the notorious Doctrinal Nourishment. Ensor’s focus on shitting and bodily waste along with images of sexual tension and violence could be an aspect of repressed sexuality. His obsession with the anal might, as Kevin Salatino suggests, imply homoerotic tendencies.23 If practiced by consenting adults and in private, sexual activity between two persons of the same sex was not a crime in Belgium but those involved in such acts were considered corrupting influences in need of control and surveillance. While any divergence from “traditional” sexual relationships between a man and a woman was considered deviant and suspicious, for some fin de siècle artists and writers, the representation of unconventional or erotic sexuality afforded a provocative and subversive way to mock contemporary values as Félicien Rops often demonstrated in his work. Rops was well known for his pornographic drawings and prints that featured strutting figures with erect, overly large penises as well as nude, or barely clothed women, who exposed themselves, are portrayed masturbating, or depicted in acts of lesbian lovemaking, being penetrated—sometimes violently—or writhing in orgasmic pleasure. Even if such libertine works illustrated the erotic fantasies of a heterosexual man, their visceral presentation and provocative display most certainly intended to offend bourgeois respectability. While these erotic prints provided Rops a steady income, his more public works, exhibited at Les XX, and other venues were just as provocative in their persistent use of sexual references and the sexualized female body to shock and scandalize middle-class values as demonstrated by his notorious Pornocrates (shown at Les XX in 1886) where a voluptuous naked woman wearing black stockings promenades with a pig. Rops also defied conventional social and sexual mores in his personal life. While his paintings and prints depicted women as sexualized objects of pleasure or perversity, he lived openly in Paris with the Deluc sisters while his wife and son stayed home in Namur. Despite attempts by most scholars to present Ensor’s life and relationships with women as heteronormative, his personal life did not follow the customary middle-class path to marriage and family. Whatever his sexual orientation or personal preferences, Ensor kept his sexuality hidden and his relationships discreet. Even Our Two Portraits, a painting that shows Ensor together with Augusta Boogaerts, suggests a clandestine rendezvous and alludes through its evasive looks, mirror reflection, and interior location, to their unusual relationship. Throughout his long career, Ensor’s transgressive nonconformity and divergence from traditional norms of binary gender and sexual norms remain consistent with his critique of the social expectations of his class. As Rops, Ensor recognized the subversive potential of sexual deviance. Unlike Rops, however, Ensor’s depictions of the femme

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fatale and images of violent deaths and forceful sex acts move away from erotic fantasy and toward a more destructive and negative view. Possibly a manifestation of anxiety over women’s bodies or a fear of sex as well as a veiled reference, perhaps, to other less heteronormative sexual practices, these representations of women point to Ensor’s difference and dissent from the norms of his times. Yet as this chapter has shown, these images only tell part of the story, as Ensor’s complex representation of women offers, as the other subjects and themes of his art practice, both a compelling look and often frank assessment of the artist’s contemporary social, cultural, and political world, one the artist makes visible and expressively unique by his insurgent and often contrary portrayal and critique.

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Epilogue

James Ensor may have declared his role as the “social one” more than one hundred years ago, but his art and creative voice seem very present today, perhaps even more so than during his own time. In recent years, exhibitions in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, and Ostend have brought a new public to Ensor’s art practice. As this study has shown, a close look at the relationship between Ensor and his milieu lends insight into his art practice and individual artistic vision while also exploring the artist’s social role and what it meant to be an artist in the nineteenth-century European fin-de-siêcle. Artists of Ensor’s generation were actively engaged in developing and promoting their art and career in an increasingly international art world and marketplace. Artistic collectivity and collaboration were on the rise, encouraging exchanges among artists like those at the salons of Les XX and the kind of artistic residency that Van Gogh hoped to establish in Arles. Exhibition societies provided mutual aid, opportunity, support, and sales even as they introduced artists to new approaches, techniques, working methods, and current art theory. As this book discusses, Ensor’s practice as an engaged modernist actively participating with and responding to the cultural dynamic of his time encompassed more than just the pursuit of a career. Belgium and other European countries in the later nineteenth century, experienced labor unrest and class conflict, religious and secular struggles over control of education and culture, and colonialist expansion, all of which found reflection in Ensor’s art. Concerns, disputes, and interactions connected with modern experience along with new perspectives drawn from evolutionary theory, scientific discoveries on perception, and the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology inspired a reassessment of modern life and values as well as a more complex understanding of the relationship between the individual and society. While Ensor may have preferred at times to present himself to the public (as seen in his poster for his first solo show in Paris at the Salon des Cent) as a misunderstood outsider, he was very much an artist of his times. Even if, as explored in this book, he purposefully constructed and reproduced a representation of himself as an outlier, he also made many self-portraits where he can be seen as a professional artist and social individual along with other portraits that explore a more solitary perspective

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and interior states of being or announce a visionary, contrary radicality, oftentimes as Christ. Yet even as Ensor’s subversive face gazed down from lampposts and billboards during a retrospective exhibition of his work in New York (James Ensor, MoMA, June 28–September 21, 2009), his paintings of masks and Christ’s entry during the carnivalesque spectacle of modern experience described as scandalous in Los Angeles (The Scandalous Art of James Ensor, Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Museum, June 10– September 7, 2014) or exhibited as a reflection of trauma in Chicago (Temptation, The Demons of Ensor, Chicago Art Institute, November 23, 2014–January 25, 2015) his work continues to be presented to the public as difficult, strange, and disturbed, sustaining the myth of alienation, disaffection, martyrdom, and neurosis despite the obvious and present social narratives that connect his work to his contemporary milieu. Indeed, a critic reviewing Ensor’s 2016 exhibition in London (Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans, Royal Academy of Art, October 29, 2016–February 29, 2017) thought the artist’s “remarkably diverse output” needed explanatory wall texts as his “antic images crackle, like twisted fairy tales, with a dark, demonic magic, and are no doubt testament to his anguished personality.”1 This critical response is not unlike those of Ensor’s times when similar comments about his mental derangement were written when his work was on view at Les XX. It seems that asking the viewer to engage directly with Ensor’s subjects and narratives goes against the grain of the Romantic myth of the alienated and isolated artist by inviting another view—one that contemplates how an artist might explore his surroundings, examine the relationship between the public self and private life, articulate the concept of social identity and even participate in acts of protest and social activism in order to articulate opposition to and dissent from the established social order. Perhaps even more directly, by making his dissonance visible by deploying bold color, exaggerated distortion, and at times, confrontational in-your-face imagery, Ensor presents and performs a more complex notion of modern social identity. Challenging the public, Ensor’s art practice refuses to be explained in ways that reinforce modernist tropes. He undermines notions of a singular style or means of production. He inserts himself into the materialist world of the bourgeois interior or interrupts its celebration of pleasurable looking through overlay, juxtaposition, and collage. He feels free to move from observation to invention, from the color and light of dunes, marshes, city views, and bourgeois salons to imagined spaces that explore and expose the performative dialectic of this exchange between the self and the social. Neither fixed nor contained, Ensor’s work remains sustained and in flux between modernity, intimacy, and subjectivity. Whether as an overt, provocative critique of current politics, a satirical upending of social values, or a celebration of middle-class life, Ensor makes it clear that, rather than alienated and isolated, he was active and aware, an artist who took seriously current theory’s assertion of the central role of creative individualism. As self-fashioned performances, Ensor’s self-portraits use humor and exaggerative masking to undermine and expose nineteenth-century constructions of class, gender, and sexuality, placing the artist’s social identity in the indeterminate position of in-between that provides through his creative acts of performance, a space of

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empowerment, interrogation, and critique. As such, Ensor strikes a pose that makes his individualism visible. As it had in his lifetime, Ensor’s art practice presents an alternative model. Perhaps this is why he appeals to creative individuals of the twenty-first century who see in his work a way to navigate through contemporary experience. His subversive strategies of opposition and performance resonate with artists looking for ways to join their expressive ideas with activism and to provide a self-produced and expressive response to their times using whatever means, methods, or subjects needed to articulate their personal expressive position and social identity. “Long Live the Social One” endures because Ensor’s performative dialogue with his world and our present one continues.

Notes Introduction 1 2

Edmond Picard, “Le Jeune Mouvement Littéraire,” L’Art moderne, 3, no. 28 (July 15, 1883): 222. Edmond Picard, “L’Art et La Révolution,” L’Art moderne, 6, no. 29 (July 18, 1886): 225. (All translations the author unless otherwise indicated).

Chapter 1 Anon (James Ensor), “Trois semaines à l'Académie,” L’Art moderne, 4, no. 35 (August 31, 1884): 285–6. 2 Emile Verhaeren, James Ensor (Brussels: Jacques Antoine, 1980), 40. 3 “Ensor intime” La Plume, Paris (1899): 26 as quoted in Ollinger-Zinque, Ensor by Himself (Brussels: Laconti, 1976): 24 (trans. Alistair Kennedy). 4 Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53–84. 5 Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth Century Media Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 17–44; 170–4. 6 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 64. 7 Chu, Most Arrogant Man in France, 18–19. 8 Manet’s painting was listed as no. 211 at the 1882 Paris Salon and Ensor’s Chez Miss (At Mademoiselle’s), later titled Russian Music, was no. 980. 9 Jack Flam, “Looking into the Abyss: The Poetics of Manet’s A Bar at the FoliesBergère”, in 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, ed. Bradford R. Collins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 164–88. 10 Ibid., 183. 11 Œuvres complêtes, ed. Marcel Ruff (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 553. 12 Katherine H. Jewett, The Daily Mirror: Production, Play and Art in Nineteenth Century Paris, Ph.D. diss. (Michigan: University of Michigan, 2000), 69. 13 Hippolyte Taine, “De l’idéal dans l’art” (1867) in Philosophie de l’art (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1893), 2:258. as quoted in Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 39. This discussion of Impressionist and Symbolist theory is indebted to Shiff ’s insightful analysis of nineteenth-century aesthetic theory. 14 Shiff, Cézanne, 20. ­15 H. Tarlier, Almanach du Commerce et de l’Industrie as reproduced in Steven F. Joseph and Tristan Schwilden, Pour une Histoire de la Photographie en Belgique (Charleroi: Musée de la Photographie, 1993), 26. 1

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16 On this controversy see Jan Dirk Baetens, “Photography in the Picture: Style, Genre and Commerce in the Art of Jan Van Beers (1852–1927) (Part I),” Image and Narrative (July, 2006). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/Jan_ Dirk_Baetens.htm 17 Unless a different number, all subsequent citations of the catalogue raisonnés of Ensor’s prints will use the Taevernier (T) reference number. 18 Shiff, Cézanne, 43. 19 Paulus Pontius’s 1630 engraving after Rubens’ self-portrait now at Windsor Castle served as the frontispiece Théophile Silvestre’s essay L’Art Flamand: Peter Paul Rubens, in C. Blanc, e. a. (ed.), Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, vol. 10, Paris (1883–84), 1–32. 20 Gustave Lagye, “L’art jeune,” La Fédération Artistique, 12, March 1, 1884. 21 Patricia G. Berman, James Ensor Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2002), 93. 22 Letter from Ensor to Louis Delattre dated August 4, 1898 (ACAB. 91660) as quoted by Gisele Ollinger-Zinque in Ensor (Brussels: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1999), 14–15. 23 Ibid., 15. 24 Emile Verhaeren, James Ensor (Brussels: Jacques Antoine, 1980), 6. 25 For a history of Belgian zwanzism and exhibition societies see Jacques van Lennep, “Les Expositions burlesques à Bruxelles de 1870 à 1914: l’Art Zwanze-une manifestation pré-dadiste?,” BMRBAB 19 (February, 1970): 127–48 and the recent discussion of Ensor’s work by Herwig Todts and Patrick Florizoone, “James Ensor et Le Burlesque” in Zwanze, Fantaisie, & Burlesque de Louis Ghémar à James Ensor, ed. Veronique Carpiaux (Namur: Musée Félicien Rops, 2019), 134–73. ­26 “Ensor intime,” La Plume, no. 232 (December 15, 1898): 27. 27 Charles de Coster’s novel, La Légende et les Aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandres et ailleurs, was first published in 1867. 28 “Christ with raised arms” refers to the Jansenist doctrine of the “narrow way” on questions of grace and predestination. With arms raised vertically Christ could embrace only a few individuals and thus the gesture was thought to signify that only a small number of the elect could be saved, a heretical doctrine condemned by a 653 papal bull. Even if this myth was debunked in the twelfth century, in the nineteenth century it was resurrected by conservative Catholics to underscore the aesthetics of Ultramontanism in depictions of the Crucifixion where Christ extended his arms horizontally to embrace all of humanity. On the imagery of the raised arms and its interaction with nineteenth-century religious art and aesthetics see Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art and Society in Nineteenth Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 88–95. 29 M. (Ernest Renan) Revue réaliste, no. 1 (April 1879): 14, as quoted in ibid., 178. 30 Thomas Carlyle, On Heros, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! 2 vols. (New York: Fred De Fau & Co., 1889) (first published in1855). Kingsley’s model Christian was also based in his anti-Catholicism. In Kingsley’s view, Catholics were effeminate and passive, especially its priests due to their celibacy. The ideal, muscular Christian man for Kingsley was physically and morally strong, rational, and independent and more than likely bearded, married, and Protestant.

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Notes

31 Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London: Macmillan, 1879) presented Christ as a true model of courage and manliness due to his discipline, patience, and reliability. 32 As quoted by Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 43. This now lost letter to Albert Croquez was written in 1934. ­33 On this copyright suit see Patrick Florizoone, James Ensor: Les Bains à Ostende (Brussels: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon/Petraco-Pandora, 1996), 43–50. 34 In French Démons me turlupinant. Turlupinade means clownery, implying buffonery, and merryment rather than the connotation of fear and anxiety that some have associated with this image.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Attachment to letter to Jules Du Jardin, October 28, 1899 reproduced in Xavier Tricot, ed. James Ensor, Lettres (Brussels: Labor, 1999), 275. James Ensor, “Ma vie en abrége,” Mes Écrits (Liège: Éditions Nationales, 1974), 205. As quoted in John David Farmer, Ensor (New York: George Braziller, 1976), 10. As reported in L’Echo d’ Ostende, November 7, 1875. The sale of the family’s possessions was held on December 9, 1875. Letter to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, January 16, 1885 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, Inv. 119.658/1). Letter Ensor to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, June, 1885 (ACAB/ Fonds Rousseau, Inv. 119.667). Letter to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, June 19, 1885 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, Inv. 119.669/1); Undated letter, beginning of July 1885 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, Inv. 119.668). Ensor letter to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, dated April 14, 1887 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, Inv.119.694). “Sursis de James Ensor,” L’Echo d’Ostende, September 26, 1875; “Faillite James Ensor,” Echo d’Ostende, November 28, 1875. Sleeping Mother, 1883, Tournai, Musée des Beaux Arts; Mitche, 1887, Belgium, private collection; Portrait of My Aunt, Antwerp, KMSKA. Letter to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau dated March 4, 1884 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, Inv. 119.644/1). Many of their studies were published in the Bulletin de la Société royale de Botanique de Belgique with their first, ­“Catalogue des Champignons observés aux environs de Bruxelles” printed in 1879, the same year Mariette met Ensor. Although it is not known when Ensor met Reclus as during the late seventies and early eighties, when Ensor was most often a guest at their home, Reclus was “officially” in exile in Switzerland. Ensor was certainly aware of his anarchist writings which were often discussed in the Rousseau home and in a later letter to Mariette written after Reclus’s death, Ensor fondly recalls the geographer and anarchist (James Ensor to Mariette Rousseau-Hannon, July 13, 1905 [ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, inv. 119.969]). The rue Vautier address appears to be the Rousseau’s main household. They also had homes in Ixelles (rue du Conseil, 59) and Watermael (Avenue des Ames, 2) where they lived in the summer.

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15 On Sofia Ioteiko, also known as Józefa Joteyko, see Patrick Florizoone discussion in James Ensor, ed. I. Pfeiffer and M. Hollein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2005), 222. 16 James Ensor, “Ma vie en abrége,” Mes écrits, 206–9. 17 Letter dated October 28, 1899 in Tricot, ed., Lettres, 276–7. 18 Georges Lemmen, “A.W. Finch,” L’Art Décoratif (September, 1899): 232. 19 Alfred William Finch, The Skate, 1880? (Ostend, Mu.ZEE); James Ensor, Skate (or Ray and Herring, Fish, or Still Life: Fish, Skate on Straw, Basket, Herring), 1880 (Antwerp, KMSKA). 20 Mauprat, “Le mouvement artistique: L’exposition des XX,” High Life (February 20, 1887). 21 Michel Draguet, “Les Vingt et le pouvoir: La mythologie des ruptures à l’épreuve des faits (1883–1893)” in L’Argent des Arts, ed. Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenrk and Valérie Montens (Brussels: Ėditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2001), 99–112. 22 As reproduced in Tricot, ed., Letters, 155. The artists Ensor lists all lived outside of Brussels: Guillaume Vanaise (1854–1902) and Jean Delvin (1853–1922) lived in Ghent. Piet Verhaert (1852–1908) Frans Simons (1855–1919), and Théodore Verstraete (1852–1908) were from Antwerp. 23 “Le Salon des XX,” La Fédération Artistique (February 14, 1885): 139. 24 “L’ exposition des XX,” La Fédération Artistique (February 13, 1886): 123. 25 A.D., “Aux XX,” L’Impartial de Gand (February 9, 1886). 26 “Chronique Artistique: Le Salon des XX,” L’Élan Littéraire (March 15, 1886). 27 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, beginning of 1885 (ACAB, Inv. 4683). 28 “Silhouettes d’Artistes: Fernand Khnopff,” L’Art moderne, 6 (September 5, 1886): 281–2. The other articles appeared on September 12, 1886: 289–90; October 10, 1886: 321–3, and April 24, 1887: 129–31. 29 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, September 6, 1886 (ACAB, Inv. 6367). 30 On this incident see Henry Bounameux, “Ensor-Khnopff: la querelle d’une image?” BMRBAB (1992–1994): 127–47. 31 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, September 13, 1886 (ACAB, Inv. 6368). 32 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, November 1886 (ACAB, Inv. 4784). In a postscript, Ensor added: “With a great deal of pain I would see Les XX lose their virginity, their nationality, and perhaps their personality by falling into the clutches of the unscrupulous.” 33 Letter to Octave Maus, November 7, 1888 (ACAB, inv. 5253). In 1890, Ensor voted without comment for the American artist’s election to Les XX. Whistler exhibited three times with Les XX always as an invité and was never elected to join the group. 34 Letter from Ensor to Maus, February 6, 1888 (ACAB, Inv. 5042). 35 Letter dated January 14, 1888 (ACAB, Inv. 5041). 36 Verhaeren’s anonymous review noted: “We had to wait for M. Ensor’s contribution. Here and there, some striking etchings: A Cathedral in marvelous, fine detail, with the crowd around it, giving a very good sense of an immense multitude. The drawings are less attractive. Meanwhile, the paintings numbered in the catalogue are not to be encountered at the Salon.” “Le Salon de XX,” L’Art moderne, 8 (February 19, 1888): 58. 37 Ensor apparently had planned to exhibit the painting in 1892, but, worried about his mother’s ill health and his own recent bout with pneumonia, decided against sending it to Les XX. In a letter to Emile Verhaeren, Ensor wrote: “I’m in torment. I was counting on my large canvas of Christ with masks [Christ’s Entry] full of movement and rumpus of accentuated kinds and intense color. My exhibition is decapitated. I need extreme effects to succeed. And everything in this canvas speaks to violence and movement.” (Tricot, ed., Lettres, 755–6).

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38 James Ensor, Lettres à Andre de Ridder (Antwerp: Librairie des Arts, 1960), 61. 39 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, November 4, 1892 (ACAB, Inv. 6306). 40 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, October 28, 1890 (ACAB, Inv. 5730). 41 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, November 4, 1892 (ACAB, Inv. 6306). 42 James Ensor, Letter to Octave Maus, November 19, 1893 (ACAB, Inv. 6308). 43 “Exposition des XX,” Le Patriote Illustré (February 21, 1892). 44 James Ensor, Letter to Picard, January 8, 1893. in Tricot, ed., Lettres, 605. 45 Sick Tramp Trying to Stay Warm was purchased by the Ostend Museum of Fine Arts (now Mu.ZEE) but later destroyed during the Second World War when the Museum was firebombed. 46 “Edmond Picard et James Ensor: Une relation vue par le prisme de Psukè” Textyles, 50–1 (2017): 18 (http://journals.open edition.org/textyles/2778). 47 Maus, “Lorsqu’en 1884 . . . .,” La Plume, December 15, 1898, 35. 48 Ibid., 31. 49 Letter from Ensor to Hannon dated February 23, 1904, in Tricot, ed., Lettres, 438–9. 50 George Lemmen, “James Ensor” La Réveil, V, 14–15 (February–March, 1895): 155–7. 51 Letter James Ensor to Jan Toorop, May 23, 1894 (The Hague, Royal Library, T.C. 116 (2)). 52 E.D. “Exposition James Ensor,” La Ligue Artistique, 2, no. 2 (January 24, 1895): 3; Eugène Demolder, “James Ensor,” La Libre Critique, 5, no. 17 (January 6, 1895): 120–1. 53 Stephen Goddard in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde: Prints, Drawings, and Books ca. 1890 (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1992), 213–14. 54 All quotations from Eugène Demolder, James Ensor (Brussels: Paul Lacomblez, 1892). 55 Letter from Vermeylen to Emmanuel de Bom dated 31-2-92 (actually February 29, 1892) AMVC Dossier V4655/B in Tricot (2009), 110. 56 Some of these speeches were later published in his collected writings: James Ensor, Mes écrits: ou, Les suffisances matamoresques, ed. Hugo Martin (Brussels: Labor, 1999). 57 Pol De Mont, “De Schilder en Etser James Ensor,” De Vlaamische School, 8, no. 29, (1895): 110–19. Eugene Georges, “James Ensor,” La Libre Critique, 6, no. 29 (October 4, 1896): 247–9. Both articles reproduced a photograph of the artist and his prints Mariakerke and Cathedral. 58 Vittorio Pica, “James Ensor,” Minerva, 20 (July, 1900): 111–12; Friedrich Dörnhöfer, “James Ensor,” Die Graphischen Künste, 23 (1900): 35–42. 59 Xavier Tricot, James Ensor. The Complete Paintings (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag and Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009), 133. 60 Van Cutsem bought ten drawings from Ensor for one hundred francs (receipt Tournay, Archives, Museum of Fine Art dated December 12, 1893). 61 Letter to Deman dated October 14, 1894 in Tricot, ed., Lettres, 112. 62 Letter to Max Stremel, May 11, 1900, in ibid., 666–7. 63 Tricot (2009), 135. 64 La Jeune Belgique, 10, no. 5 (May 1891): 228. 65 Eugène Demolder, “James Ensor,” Le Diable-au-Corps 2, no. 52 (December 30, 1894): 6. 66 Tricot, ed., Lettres, 472–5. 67 Letter to Deschamps, May 26, 1898 in ibid., 211–13. ­68 Letter James Ensor to Théo Hannon, n.d. (1898) AML (ML 2264) in Tricot, ed., Lettres, 435. 69 Text of letter reproduced in Ensor, ein Maler aus dem späten 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Uwe M. Schneede (Stuttgart: Württzemberg Kunstverein, 1972), 41.

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70 See G. Haydon-Huntley, “Munch and Ensor,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2 (1943): 368. The cock also could refer to the journal Le Coq Rouge founded in 1895 by Demolder, Verhaeren, Georges Eekhoud, and Maurice Maeterlinck, among others. 71 For a complete listing of Ensor’s exhibitions during his lifetime see Tricot (2009), 424–5, 431–5, and 444–50. 72 Vriamont, an accomplished pianist, published the album La Gamme d’Amour that included 22 colored lithographs on La Gamme d’Amour (produced by Vraimont) of both sets and the characters in the ballet (Ostend, Mu.ZEE) in 1929 to coincide with Ensor’s retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. On the ballet, music, and performances, see Roger Wangermée, “La Gamme d’Amour and Ensor’s Music” in Ensor (Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), 54–62. 73 The score, but not the ballet, was first performed in 1917 by the orchestra at the Ostend Music Academy consisting of professors, students, and a few local amateur musicians. After the ballet was staged at the Galerie Giroux, Ensor tried unsuccessfully to have it performed in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées by Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. 74 Richard Hobbs, “Ensor’s Hyperbolic Joie de Vivre,” in Joie de Vivre in French Literature and Culture: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman, ed. Susan Harrow and Timothy Unwin (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009), 239–54.

Chapter 3 Emile Verhaeren, “Chronique artistique: Le Salon de Gand,” La Jeune Belgique, 2 (October 1, 1883): 435, as quoted in Marnin Young, Realism in the Age of Impressionism, 167. 2 Bénédict-Augustin Morel, Traité des maladies mentales (Paris: Librarie V. Masson, 1860); De la Formation du type dans les variétés degénérées ou nouveaux éléments d’anthropologie morbide (Paris: J.B. Baillière, 1864). 3 Herwig Todts, Ensor Revealed (Brussels: ING Cultural Center, 2010), 237. 4 Paul Margueritte, “Le Petit Théâtre (Théâtre de Marionettes),” Paris, 1889, 7–8, as quoted in Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre, 1892–1992 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 21. 5 Marcel de Maeyer, “Mystic Death of a Theologian” in Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York: The Drawing Center, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 191. 6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990). 7 “Reflections sur L’Art,” 1882 in Ensor, Mes Écrits, 50. 8 Demolder, James Ensor, 7. 9 For an in-depth discussion of the politic of religious art, see Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art and Society in Nineteenth Century France (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992). 10 Ensor’s use of these terms was a direct reference to a series of articles published in the summer of 1885 in L’Art moderne under the title “Essai de pathologie littéraire (“Essay on the literary pathologies (of poetry)” that traced the diverse modalities of Symbolist poetry. Blonds-Belgique refers to “La petite veuve” (“The Little Widow”), a theater piece by Georges Rodenbach and Max Waller. 1

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11 Letter from Ensor to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau, January 9, 1887 (ACAB/Fonds Rousseau, inv. 119.691/1). 12 Edouard Anseele (1856–1938) was also a founding member of the Belgian Workers Party (BWP). Falleur refers to Oscar Falleur (1855–96) a BWP founder from Wallonia. 13 Ensor copied a photogravure reproduction of Nadar’s c. 1870 photograph of Littré, possibly from the June 19, 1881, issue of Le Illustration belge, 340 published at the time of Littré’s death. 14 Ernest Renan, La Vie de Jésus (Paris: chez Michel Lévy frères, 1863). ­15 In addition to his translation of Strauss’s Life of Christ, Littré’s ideas were summarized in his influential book Conservation, révolution et positivisme (Paris: Ladrange, 1852) with a supplement published in 1876. 16 “Aux Salon des XX,” La Nation (February 7, l887). 17 A.J. Wauters, “Aux XX,” La Gazette (February 7, 1887). 18 Anonymous, “Chronique générale,” Journal des Beaux-Arts et de la literature, 29 (February 28, 1887): 31, quoting from Moniteur des Arts (Paris). 19 Emile Verhaeren: Ecrits sur art, 271 as quoted in Between Street and Mirror, 41 (Translation: Dirk Verbiest). 20 Emile Hennequin, Quelques Ecrivains Français (Paris: Perrin et cie, 1890), 66, as quoted in Nancy Davenport, “Between Carnival and Dream: St Anthony, Gustave Flaubert, and the Arts in Fin de Siècle Europe,” Religion and the Arts, 6, no. 3 (2002): 307. 21 Ensor returned to these subjects numerous times. In addition to the two later drawings, dating from 1890 to 1895, The Temptation of St. Anthony (formerly in the Ernest Rousseau collection) and Christ Comes to the Aid of St. Anthony of 1901, now in private collections in Brussels, and a red pencil drawing of 1930 where the saint is surrounded by naked women (Ostend, Mu.ZEE inv 1958/310), Ensor made a number of works related to the temptation theme and inspired by St. Anthony’s plight. These include his 1888 etching Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels (also known as Fight of the Demons) (T.23) and the 1899 etching The Queen Parysatis Flaying a Eunnuch (T.116, E.121). Ensor made a replica of his 1887 painting Tribulations of St. Anthony in 1909 (Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art) and another version, The Teasing of Saint Anthony in 1932/33 (Belgium, Private collection). 22 Although Ensor later claimed he did know of Bosch’s work when he made this painting, in a letter he wrote to Mme. Rousseau thanking her for the Callot book (Marius Vachon’s monograph Jacques Callot (Paris: J. Rouam, 1886), he expressed his enthusiasm for Bosch’s invention and “devilish imagination” in a version of the Temptation then at the Royal Museum in Brussels (RMFAB, inv. 3032), a copy of Bosch’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c.1500–1505), Lisboa, Museu Nacionel de Arte Antiga (inv. MNAA 1498) (letter dated, January 9, 1887, ACAB/ Fonds Rousseau, inv. 119.691/1). 23 The sash reads “Long Live Anthony, Our Lord, and Labre” (“VIVE ANTOINE notre SEIGNEUR ET LABRE”) while “Long live Saint Julien and Saint Émilion” (“VIVE LE ST. JULIEN AND ET ÉMILION”) is written on the bottom of this figure’s apron/robe. St. Julien, also known as Julian the Hospitable, a saint believed to have been born in Ath, Belgium in the seventh century, is recognized as the patron of both travel and the city of Ghent. St. Emilion was a traveling monk and confessor who settled in France in the eighth century. 24 During this time, an iguanodon skeleton could be seen at the Museum of Natural Sciences (part of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) near the Rousseau

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home on the Rue Vautier. This skeleton was reconstructed from a large field of thirty iguanodon fossils discovered in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium, in February 1878 and put on display at the Royal Institute in July 1883. 25 The print misspells the name of Célestin Demblon (1859–1924), the militant Wallonian socialist and Symbolist writer who was elected to the Belgian Parliament in 1894. 26 Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789–1880, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 130. 27 Jean Pierre Claris de Florian, Fables of Florian (Paris: J. J. Dubochet et Cie, 1842), illustrations by J.J Grandville, Book II, Fable VII, 76. 28 Francine Claire Legrand, Ensor, Cet Inconnu (Brussels: La Renaissance de Livre, 1971), 73. 29 Ensor uses the French word “peste” from the Latin “pestis” (pestulence or plague) and “pestilentia” from where “pestilence” derives. Herwig Todts, James Ensor, an Occassional Modernist 359–360 (also n.105) translates the title as Stench above, stench below, stench everywhere or Hell above, hell below, hell everywhere. 30 For a detailed discussion of this painting, see Vincent Heymans, Ensor et les Médecins: Un Diagnostic, (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1997). 31 James Ensor, Mes Écrits, (Liège: Éditions Nationales, 1974), 148. 32 The information on the painting is contained in Theodor Kiefer, “Letter to the Curator of Modern European Paintings,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. May 27, 1974, Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum. Kiefer, who dates the painting to 1915, conducted interviews with both Heckel and Mrs. Kerschbaumer.

Chapter 4 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

The full text “On Women” can be found in Paul Haesaerts, James Ensor, trans.: Nobert Guterman (New York: Abrams, 1957), 360. In a letter to Pol de Mont about his art work and career, Ensor wrote: “Apparently the artist does not like women, for invariably he treats them badly.” Letter, end of 1894 or beginning of 1895, as reproduced in Herwig Todts, Goya, Redon, Ensor: Grotesque Paintings and Drawings (Antwerp: Lannoo, 2009), 130. Herman Piron, James Ensor, een psychoanalytische studie (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Bookhandel, 1968). Histoire des Beaux-Arts en Belgique, 1830–1887 (Brussels: P. Weissenbruch, 1887), 315, as quoted in Xavier Tricot (2009), 43 (trans.: Trista Selous). Other women artists who exhibited at Les XX included Louise Breslau (1885); Clara Montalba (1886); Marie Cazin (1887); Charlotte Besnard (1888); and Marguerite Holeman and Jeanne Jacquemin (1893). Danielle Derrey-Capon, Alfred Stevens (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009), 161. Beatrice Farwell, “Manet, Morisot and Propriety” in Perspectives on Morisot, ed. T. J. Edelstein (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), 54. Beverly Gordon, “Women’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” Winterthur Portfolio, 31 (Winter, 1996): 281.

226

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8

These two drawings from the estate of Ensor’s great ­grandnephew are reproduced in James Ensor 1860–1949: Schilderijen, tekeningen en grafiek, een selectie uit Belgisch en Nederlands bezit (Utrecht: Central Museum, 1993), 160–16 (ill. T 48, T49). 9 Ibid., 158 (ill. T46/A-1). 10 Anna Green, French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, 1848–1886 (Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007). 11 Jane Dieulafoy published her journal on their travels in Le Tour du Monde from 1883 to 1886 and then as a book in 1887 under the title La Perse, la Chaldée, la Susiane (Paris: Hachette, 1887). The following year she published her journal on the discovery of Susa as À Suse, journal des fouilles, 1884–1886 (Paris, 1888). In 1890 Mme Dieulafoy published her first novel, Parysatis, which became the book for the opera first presented in Beziers, France with a score by Camille Saint-Saens. 12 As quoted in Todts, Goya, Redon, Ensor, 130. 13 Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 93–4. 14 “The Masked Soul of James Ensor” in Ensor, 1999, 42 (ill.2). 15 Ibid., 44. 16 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 162–89. 17 “A bust for town halls” in Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 710, as quoted in Agulhon, Marianne, 179. 18 This discussion of Marian devotion and female roles is drawn from Patricia A. McEachern, “La Vierge et la bête: Marian Iconographies and Bestial Effigies in Nineteenth-Century French Narratives,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 31 (Fall—Winter 2002–2003): 111–22. 19 Carol Engelhardt Herringer, Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830–1885 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008). 20 Nora M. Heimann, Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700–1855): From Satire to Sanctity (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2005), 8–9. ­21 Jules Michelet, Joan of Arc: The Maid of Orleans, trans. Henry Ketcham (New York: A.L. Burt Company, 1900). 22 For further discussion of women and smoking see Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain (Oxford: Berg, 2006) and Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Persona,” Art Bulletin, 75 (December 1993): 627–46. 23 “Ensor in L.A,” 81, n. 10. Salatino notes that in Lust from the Seven Deadly Sins the figure of Death, in bed with a naked man and woman, caresses the man’s buttocks with his penis.

Epilogue 1

Alastair Sooke, “James Ensor’s carnival of grotesques crackles like a twisted fairytale,” The Telegraph, October 23, 2016, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-tosee/james-ensors-carnival-of-grotesques-crackles-like-a-twisted-fair/. Review of Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans, Royal Academy, London, October 29, 2016 to January 29, 2017.

Bibliography Writings by Ensor Ensor, James. Les Écrits de James Ensor. Brussels: Sélections, 1921. Ensor, James. Les Ecrits de James Ensor. Brussels: Éditions Lumière, 1944. Ensor, James. Lettres à Andre de Ridder. Antwerp: Librairie des Arts, l960. Ensor, James. Mes Écrits. Liège: Éditions Nationales, 1974. Ensor, James. Mes Écrits: ou, Les suffisances matamoresques, edited by Hugo Martin. Brussels: Labor, 1999. Ensor, James. James Ensor, Lettres, edited by Xavier Tricot. Brussels: Labor, 1999. Ensor, James. “Trois semaines à l’Academie” in Drawing Papers 21, 5–6. New York: Drawing Center, 2001.

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Index Locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes Academy of Fine Arts/Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Brussels) 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 58, 65, 75–7, 120, 183 affaire Lambin 147 Agulhon, Maurice 137, 201 alcoholism 5, 9, 57–8, 110–13, 146 Alhambra Theater (Brussels) 32, 75 anarcho-socialism 7, 80–1, 89, 99, 103, 122 Anseele, Edward (1856–1938) 6, 124, 139, 224 n.12. See also Vooruit (“Forward”) anti-vivisection movement 155 Antoine, André, Théâtre Libre 118 Antwerp artists, art groups and supporters de Bom, Emmanuel (1868–1953) 99, 160 De Kapel 99 Franck, Charles (1875–1930) 99 Franck, François (1872–1932) 99–100 Franck, Louis (1869–1937) 99 Kunst van Heden/ L’Art contemporain (Art of Today) 99 Les XIII (Antwerp) 95 Overloop, Jef (1878–1949) 99 Vaes, Walter (1882–1958) 99 Van Nu en Straks (Of Now and Tomorrow) 96, 160 Vermeylen, August 94, 96, 160 Vie et Lumière 99 Wouters, Rik (1882–1916) 99 Artan de Saint-Martin, Louis (1837–1890) 77, 79 Artaxerxes II 188 Art Ensor (hareng saur) 40–1, 87–8 artist maudit 40 Arts and Crafts movement 99 Association Belge de Photographie (ABP). See Belgian Association of Photography

avant-garde 176, 195 artist 75–7, 79–80 avant-garde-modern theory 13 Belgian 11, 80–2, 88, 93 Ball of the Dead Rat (event) 94 ­Bara, Jules (1835–1900) 3 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, Joan of Arc (1879) 205 Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867) 19, 41, 46, 176, 193, 195 “The Painter of Modern Life” 138 Beernaert, Auguste (1829–1912) 3 Belgian Association of Photography 21–2 Belgian culture (theaters and nightlife) Diable-au-Corps cabaret (Brussels) 32, 96 Lynen, Amédée (1852–1938) 31–2 Lynen, Armand (1849–1932) 31–2 Malpertius, Lucien-Joseph (Luc) (1865–1933) 32 Rat Mort cabaret (Ostend) 32, 94, 100 Toone Marionette Theater 31 Vos, Charles (1860–1939) 32 zwanzist/fumiste 32, 117, 219 n.25 Belgian politics and political parties Bara, Jules (1835–1900) 3 Beernaert, Auguste (1829–1912) 3 Belgian Workers Party, BWP (Belgische Werkliedenpartij/Parti Ouvrier Belge) 6, 9, 34, 124–6, 136–7, 145, 166, 224 n.12 Catholic Party 2–3, 5, 34, 41, 122, 124, 126–7, 143, 145 Denis, Hector (1842–1913) 72–3 Destrée, Jules (1863–1941) 72, 147 Frère-Orban, Walthère (1812–96) 3 Liberal Party (see Liberal Party) Vooruit (“Forward,” 1873), Anseele 6, 124

Index Belgian Workers Party (Belgische Werkliedenpartij/Parti Ouvrier Belge, BWP) 6, 9, 34, 124–6, 136–7, 145, 166, 224 n.12. See also Belgian politics and political parties Belgium. See also Belgian culture (theaters and nightlife) Banque de Belgique 2 in Ensor’s time 2–10 expansion of trade 4 foires foraine 131 judiciary system 147 labor life and working conditions 5 in the nineteenth century (satire and politics) 141–8 recessions 2, 5 religion and politics 34 (see also Belgian politics and political parties) Société Générale 2 unemployment 5–6 Bellis, Louis 122 Berman, Patricia 29 Bernières, Claude 164, 209 Bierbaum, Julius (1865–1910) 95 Blue Cross of the Belgian Coast 155 Boch, Anna (1848–1936) 87, 104, 167 bohemia, artist 14, 16, 80–1, 176 Bommer, Jean-Édouard (J.E.) (1829–1895) 69, 72 Bonnat, Léon, Crucifixion (1874) 37 ­Boogaerts, Augusta (1870–1951) 48, 99, 164, 207–12 Bosch, Hieronymus 89, 131, 192 devilish imagination 224 n.22 Bosman, Flor 100 Boulenger, Hippolyte (1837–1874) 79 Boulevard Anspach 123–4 Bouts, Dirk 39 bras étroits (“with raised arms”) 37, 219 n.28 Brewster, David 121 Brown, Ford Maddox 39 Brueghel, Pieter 127 Fall of the Rebel Angels 192 Brusselmans, Jean 100 Brusselmans, Michel (1886–1960) 100 Brussels art world 75–7, 79–80, 91, 124 Cercle Artistique et Littéraire (Brussels) 79, 95

243

Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium) movement 7, 65, 84, 96 La Chrysalide (Chrysalis) 27, 65–6, 77, 79, 81, 104, 138, 165 La Libre Esthétique 90–1, 95, 99, 158, 187 L ’Art moderne (Modern Art) 11, 31, 81, 90–1, 100, 122, 223 n.10 L’Essor (Flight) 32, 66, 76–7, 79, 105, 109, 165 Les Vingt/Les XX 1, 3–4, 8, 11, 21, 27, 36–7, 40–1, 45, 65, 75, 77, 79–81, 100, 103–4, 106, 122, 124–5, 128, 133, 137–8, 144, 148, 158–9, 167–8, 171, 177–8, 181, 212, 216, 221 n.33 Maison d’Art (House of Art) 89, 96 Société Libre des Beaux-Arts (Free Society of Fine Arts) 15, 65, 79 Theater of the House of Art 31, 89, 96 Brussels-Bruges-Ostend railroad line (1838) 54 Brussels World’s Fair (Congo Free State) 4 Bruylandt, Jan, Fridolien (1864) 92 Buelens, Felix 179 Buésco, Paul 96 Buysse, Cyriel 160 Caesar’s Disclaimer 129 Caillebotte, Gustave (1848–1894) 85, 107 Luncheon (1876) 107 Caillebotte, René 107 Callot, Jacques 131, 192, 198 calotype 21 Carlyle, Thomas 39 Carroll, Lewis 186 carte de visite photograph 21–2, 28, 195 Cassatt, Mary 167–8, 172, 175, 178–80 The Tea (1880) 179 Young Woman in Black (Portrait of Madame J.) 174–5 Catholic Party 2–3, 5, 34, 41, 122, 124, 126–7, 143, 145. See also Belgian politics and political parties Cercle Artistique et Littéraire (Brussels) 79, 95 Cercle des Beaux-Arts (Ostend) 91, 95, 97, 99 ­Cercle du Phare 76 Cézanne, Paul 188

244

Index

Charles Neyt studio 22 Charlet, Frantz 81–2, 95 Chassériau, Théodore, Toilet of Esther 183 Chat Noir café, Paris (George Auriol and Henry Somm) 117, 131 cholera 5, 55, 132, 148, 152, 155–6 Christ, Ensor as 1, 7, 11, 34, 93, 124, 127, 130, 216 Calvary (1886) 34–8, 40–2, 126, 159 Christ in Hell (1886) 128 Christ Mourned by Angels (1886) 38–9, 211 Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) 1, 7–8, 37–8, 50, 76, 85–6, 118, 126, 129, 132, 135–40, 196, 198–9, 201, 209 crucifixion, self-representation and 36, 40, 44, 147–8, 219 n.28 The Halos of Christ series 39, 44, 76, 136, 140 INRI (“Hail Jesus, King of the Jews”) inscription 36, 124 The Intense: Christ rises to the Sky 127 The Lively and the Radiant: The Entry into Jerusalem (The Entry into Jerusalem) 122–7, 129, 136–7, 139–40, 160 maleness and masculinity 39 The Merchants Chased from the Temple (1886) 128 poses, range of 40 The Rising: Christ shown to the People (1885) 39, 126 Sad and Broken: Satan and his Fantastic Legions Tormenting the Crucified Christ (1886) 39, 126 self-identification with 9, 34, 38, 85–6, 126 Temptation of Christ (1888) 130 The Tranquil and Serene: The Descent from the Cross (1886) 126 Virgin of Consolation 39, 41, 202–5, 211 Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) 1, 7–8, 37–8, 50, 76, 85–6, 118, 126, 129, 132, 135–41, 144, 196, 201, 209 crowd and 139–40, 144 at Mardi Gras 136 religious allegory 140 “Sociale” 137 chryselephantine sculpture 4

Chu, Petra 18 Civil Code women 168 Claudel, Paul 57 commedia dell’arte 114, 134, 137, 197–8 Communist Manifesto 2 Company of the Dead Rat/Rat Mort Society 32, 94, 100, 158 Compte, Auguste (1798–1857) 19–20 Congo Berlin Conference (1884–85) 3 Free State of the Congo 3–4, 134 International African Society 3 Reform Association 4 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (Blackwood’s Magazine) 4 contagion 9, 126, 132, 134 ­autopsies 154 doctors and medicine, mocking satires 153 etchings 149–50 gastrointestinal disorders 155 germ theory 148–9 magnetic healing, theories 154 medical discourse and social policy 149 middle-class propriety 150 Ostend’s beach, benefits 156 public health laws 153 tuberculous and cholera epidemics 152, 156 contre-jour effect 171 Cornélis-Servais, Ida (1855–1941) 158 Coucke and Goethals trial 147 Courbet, Gustave (1819–1877) 14–16, 18, 66, 79, 187 Self-Portrait with Leather Belt (1845–46) 18 Self-Portrait with Pipe (c.1849–50) 18 The Wounded Man (c.1848) 18 Crary, Jonathan 121 Crépin, François (1830–1903) 69, 72 Crocq, Jean-Joseph (1824–1898) 152 Cros, Charles 40–1, 176 cross-dressing 8–9, 11, 34, 75, 164, 197 Cruikshank, George 138, 153 London in 1851 or The Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and family 138 daguerreotype 21 Dance of Death images 24, 42, 44

Index Dandoy studios 22 Darius II 188 Darwin, Charles, Origin of the Species 72 Daumier, Honoré 153 Men of Justice (1845) 146 Daurelle, Jean 107 d’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey, Les Diaboliques 186–7 Daveluy, Alexandrine. See Daveluy, Jeanne Taen Hee Tseu (1893–1966) Daveluy, Georges 95 Daveluy, Jeanne Taen Hee Tseu (1893–1966) 209–10 de Bom, Emmanuel (1868–1953) 99, 160 de Burlet, Jules 97 Degas, Edgar 41 Young Spartans Exercising (1860–63) 186 de Greef, Guillaume (1842–1924) 72–3 de Groux, Charles (1825–1870) 113 de Groux, Henri (1866–1930) 88 De Kapel 99 de Maeyer, Marcel 121 Deman, Edmond (1857–1918) 95, 99 Adoration of the Shepherd (1887) 95 ­Demolder, Eugène (1862–1919) 72, 88–9, 92, 96–9, 121, 205 Flemish primitivism and medieval art 92–3 Icon (1893) 92 La Légende de Yperdamme (The Legend of Yperdamme, 1891) 92 Les Contes d’Yperdamme (The Songs of Yperdamme, 1891) 92 de Mont, Pol 94, 98, 194, 225 n.1 Denis, Hector (1842–1913) 72–3 de Regoyos, Dario (1857–1913) 76, 81–2, 84 de Ridder, André (1888–1961) 100 Derrey-Capon, Danielle 169, 198 De Ryckx, Fé 100 Deschamps, Léon (1863–1899) 96–8 Destrée, Jules (1863–1941) 72, 147 Destrée-Bommer, Elisa Caroline (1832–1910) 69, 72 De Vlaamishe School 94, 98 de Waha de Chestret, Léonie 167 Die Graphischen Künste 94 Die Insel 95 Dieulafoy, Jane (1851–1916) 188, 226 n.11

245

Dieulafoy, Marcel-Auguste (1844–1920) 188 “Doctrinaire Fanfares Always Succeed” (placard) 137, 201 Doré, Gustave 127 Dörnhöfer, Friedrich 94 Draguet, Michel 81 Dubar, Edouard (1803–79) 20–1 Dubois, Paul (1829–1905) 76 Dubois-Pillet, Albert (1846–1890) 85 Dujardin, Antoine (1848–1933) 95 du Jardin, Jules 76 Duval, Jeanne 176 Edebau, Frank Patrick 57 Ėduard, Jules (1829–1895) 72 Einstein, Albert 53 Emilion (saint) 133, 135 Engels, Friedrich 2 Ensor, James 1, 11, 51, 70, 77, 82, 163, 215, 224 n.21 absence and presence 49–51 Art Ensor (hareng saur) 40–1, 87–8 art practice 2, 8, 62, 64, 66, 74, 91, 103, 120–1, 135, 163, 213, 216–17 as avant-garde artist 8, 75–7, 79–80 exchanges of works 95 as Jesus Christ (see Christ, Ensor as) patronage 164 Pro Luce Nobilis Sum (“For Noble Light I Am”) 121 as realist painter 7 sardonic purpose 123 social identity 8–9, 14, 26, 38, 41, 216 studio 55, 63 urban culture 76 ­working-class life 108–14 works (see works (Ensor)) Ensor, James Frederic (1838–1887) 56–7, 59–61, 63, 77, 168, 206, 210 alcoholism 57–8, 113 education and occupation 57 Errera, Leo (1858–1905) 72 Evely, Léon (1849–1937) 22, 96 Falleur 124, 224 n.12 family 163, 206 bankruptcy 57–8, 62, 113, 168, 206

246

Index

business 57, 59, 62–3, 157, 168 Daveluy, Jeanne Taen Hee Tseu (Alexandrine) (1893–1966) 209–10 depictions 56–8, 59, 62–3 Ensor, James Frederic (1838–1887) 31, 56–61, 63, 77, 113, 168, 206, 210 Ensor, Marie Louise Catherine Haeghenan (1835–1915) 56–7, 59, 64, 105, 168 Ensor, Marie (Mitche) (1861–1945) 27, 31, 56, 60–1, 63–4, 70, 105–7, 150, 165, 168–9, 172–4, 178, 183, 206–7, 210 Haegheman, Maria Ludovica (1839– 1916) 56–8, 61–4, 168, 206 Hauwaert, Marie Antoinette Henriette (1807–1887) 56, 60 petite-bourgeois, environment 64 Farwell, Beatrice 177 Fétis, Ėdouard (1812–1909) 36, 40, 88 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews (1742) 115 Finch, Alfred William “Willy” (1854– 1930) 76–7, 79, 81–2, 91–2, 105, 108, 126, 150 Finch, Joseph James Lindsey 76–7 Flam, Jack 19 Flament, Jeanne (1882–1956) 158 Flanders 6, 92, 160 flâneur 109 Flaubert, Gustave, Temptation of St. Anthony 76, 85, 130–1, 133–6, 139, 141, 150, 188 Flemish Movement (“Le Mouvement Flamand”) 124, 147, 160 Flemish Royal Opera (Antwerp) 100 Franck, Charles (1875–1930) 99 Franck, François (1872–1932) 99–100 Franck, Louis (1869–1937) 99 Frédéric, Léon (1856–1940), Studio Interior 43–4 Freemasons 68, 72, 74, 85, 92, 124, 133 French Legion of Honor 53 Frère-Orban, Walthère (1812–96) 3 Fried, Michael 18 Fries, Elias Magnus (1794–1878) 72–3 Gallait, Louis 129 The Last Honors Rendered to Counts Egmont and Horne (1851) 142 Ganesco, Constantin (1864–1940) 96

Georges, Eugene 94 gesamtkunstwerk 100 Gevaert, François-Auguste (1828–1908) 158 Ghent Salon (1883) 104 Gille, Valère (1867–1950) 96 ­Goddard, Stephen 92 Gonzalès, Jeanne 167 Gordon, Beverly 182 Gospel of Matthew 130 Gounod, Charles-François 131 Great Exhibition (Crystal Palace) 138 Haagsche Kunstkring, The Hague 94 Haegheman, Jean Louis 58 Haesaerts, Paul 163 Hannon, Ėdouard (1853–1931) 22, 95 Hannon, Joseph-Désiré (1822–1870) 69 Hannon, Théodore (Théo) (1851–1916) 14, 21–2, 31–2, 65–6, 68, 79, 88, 90, 92, 94, 114, 118, 197 Au Pays de Manneken-Pis 33 Bruxelles Sans Gêne or Bruxelles au Vol 75 L’Artiste 65 Ostend Histories 184 hareng saur (Art Ensor) 40–1, 87–8 Heckel, Eric (1883–1970) 159 Hélène Fourment and Her Children ClaireJeanne and François 29 Hellens, Franz (1881–1972) 100 Hemma, L. 82 Hennequin, Emile (1850–88) 131 Herkens, Astrid 89 Hermans, Charles (1839–1924) 15–16 heroic individualism 54 Herringer, Carol 204 Hertoge, Blanche (1884–1951) 164 heteronormative 164, 212–13 Hobbs, Richard 101 Hogarth, William 115, 153 The Four Stages of Cruelty 153 The Reward of Cruelty (1751) 153 homosexuality 128, 212 Hughes, Thomas 39 Hunt, William Holman 39 Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1848–1907) 65 Against the Grain (À Rebours, 1884) 19 preface, Rimes de Joie (Rhymes of Joy) 66

Index Immaculate Conception dogma 203–4 impressionists/impressionist movement 8, 14, 17, 26–7, 53, 82, 90, 124, 164, 168, 176–7, 179, 186, 218 n.13 Industrial Revolution 149 Insel, Die 95 International Exhibition 95 Ioteiko, Sofia (Józefa Joteyko, 1866–1928) 75, 220 n.15 Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck. See Lamarck Jeune Belgique (Young Belgium) movement 7, 65, 84, 96 Jewett, Helen 19 ­Jordaens, Jacob 28 Journal des Tribunaux 147 Julien (saint) 133, 135, 224 n.23 Kaesbach, Walter (1879–1961) 159 Kandinsky, Wassily 100 Kerschbaumer, Anton (1885–1931) 159 Khnopff, Fernand (1858–1921) 76, 80, 83–4, 87 After Flaubert 131 On Listening to Schuman 83, 91 Kiefer, Theodor 225 n.32 Kingsley, Charles 219 n.30 muscular Christianity 39 Kistemaeckers, Henry 33 Koch, Robert 148–9, 155 Korsor, Max 89 Korty, Sonai 100 Koundenberg Cathedral (Brussels) 35–6 Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921) 7 Labre, Benedict (Benoit) Joseph (1748–83) 133–5 La Chrysalide (Chrysalis) 27, 65–6, 77, 79, 81, 104, 138, 165 La Gamme d’Amour/The Scale of Love 32, 100, 223 n.72, 223 n.73 Bosman, Flor 100 de Ridder, André (1888–1961) 100 De Ryckx, Fé 100 Flemish Royal Opera (1924) 100 Gallery Giroux (1920) 100, 223 n.73 Korty, Sonai 100 Romance of the Marionnettes (Poppenliefde) 100

247

Royal Theater, Liege (1930) 100 Van der Borght, Jean 100 Van Hecke, Peter-Gabriel (1887–1967) 100 Vriamont, Georges (1896–1961) 100, 223 n.72 La Liberté 73 La Libre Esthétique 90–1, 95, 99, 158, 187 Lamarck 152 Lambeaux, Jef 68 Lambotte, Albin 97, 99, 209 Lambotte, Emma (1878–1963) 97, 99, 164, 209–10 Lamertin, Henri 153 La Misère 147 La Mousse 167 La Plume 32, 50, 89–90, 94, 96–8 L ’Art moderne (Modern Art) 11, 31, 81, 90–1, 100, 122, 223 n.10 Maus, Octave (1856–1919) 45, 80–1, 83–91, 93–5, 126, 148, 157 Picard, Edmond (1836–1924) 7, 31, 48, 80–1, 87–9, 92, 94, 96–7, 118, 131, 139, 147–8, 190 Verhaeren, Emile (1855–1916) 16, 31, 80–1, 83–5, 88–9, 91–2, 94, 97, 104, 127, 205, 221 n.36, 221 n.37 La Scala Theater (Brussels) 32 ­La Société Nouvelle 73 laws of property/propriety 104 Le Bon, Gustave (1841–1931) 139–40, 200 Man and Society 139 The Psychology of Crowds 139 Le Coq Rouge 97 Le Globe illustré 141 Legrand, Francine-Claire 147 Legros, Alphonse 154 Lehrs, Max 97 Le Libre Critique 92 Leman, Gérard Matthieu (1851–1920) 72, 74, 207, 211 Lemmen, George (1865–1916) 77, 87, 91 Lemonnier, Camile (1844–1913) 72, 88, 165–6 Lenoir, Claire 198 Leopold II (1835–1909) 3, 55, 99, 124, 134, 141, 143–4, 157 “Builder King” 4 Congo Free State 3–4, 134

248

Index

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (Blackwood’s Magazine) 4 International African Society 3 in Ostend 55 Stanley, Henry (1841–1904) 3 Leo XIII 135 Le Petit, Alfred, “The Hydra of Socialism in Belgium” 6 Lesko, Diane 198 L’Essor (Flight) 32, 66, 76–7, 79, 105, 109, 165 “Les tribulations d’un juge” 147 Les Vingt/Les XX 1, 3–4, 8, 11, 21, 27, 36–7, 40–1, 45, 65, 75, 77, 79–81, 88, 100, 103–4, 106, 122, 124–5, 128, 133, 137–8, 144, 148, 158–9, 167–8, 171, 177–8, 181, 212, 216, 221 n.33 catalog (1888) 28 early salons 81–3 growing discord 83–91 Maus, Octave (1856–1919) 45, 80, 83, 87, 148 Picard, Edmond (1836–1924) 80–1, 83, 87, 89, 92, 131, 148, 190 recognition and support 91–101 salons 1, 3, 27–9, 34, 37, 49, 66, 74, 88, 108, 110, 127, 131, 153, 158, 160, 165, 186, 190, 215 Les XIII (Antwerp) 95 Le Table Ronde 95 Le Tour du Monde 226 n.11 Le Tout-Liège 210 Leuring, W.J.H. 91 Liberal Party 2–3, 5–6, 34, 145, 201 Doctrinaires 2–3, 137 education reforms 166 Progressives 2–3, 34, 68, 72, 89, 103 state-controlled schools 3 “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” (“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”) 124 ­Libre Académie de Belgique 89 L’Impartial de Gand 82 L’Indépendence Belge 36 Littré, Émile (1801–1888) 18–20, 124–5, 127, 137 Lochner, Stephan, Madonna of the Rose Bower 93 Lombroso, Cesar, Man of Genius 113

“Long Live the Social One” (banner) 1, 7, 86, 124, 136–7, 217 Lynen, Amédée (1852–1938) 31–3 Lynen, Armand (1849–1932) 31–2 Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949) 32, 94, 117–18 magnetic healing 154 male nudes 183 Masks Watching a Negro Tumbler (1878–79, c. 1890) 183 Mallarmé, Stephan, Poésies (1899) 99 Malpertius, Lucien-Joseph (Luc) (1865–1933) 32 Manet, Édouard (1832–1883) 14, 66, 79, 93, 169, 176–7, 184, 187 A Bar at Folies-Bergère (1881–82) 18–19 The Lady with the Fans, Nina de Callais (1873) 176 Olympia 186 Portrait of Emile Zola (1868) 66–7 Portrait of Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa (1874) 176 Repose (1870) 176 Marchal, Ėlie (1839–1923) 69, 72 Margueritte, Paul (1860–1918), Pierrot Assassin of His Wife 118 Marx, Karl 2, 6 masking 8, 114–15, 137, 216 Massart, Jean (1865–1925) 72 Mauclair, Camille 94 Maus, Octave (1856–1919) 45, 80–1, 83–91, 93–5, 126, 148, 157 Max, Adolph 123 Mayhew, Henry, London in 1851 or The Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and family 138 medical discourse and social policy 149 Mesmer, Franz (1734–1815) 154 mesmerism 154–5 Meunier, Constantin (1831–1905) 66 Michelet, Jules 205 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan) 75 Millais, John Everett 39 modernism, duality 19 Monet, Claude Meditation: Madame Monet Sitting on a Sofa 176 Portrait of Madame Claude Monet 176

Index The Monkey and the Magical Lantern (Florian) 144 Morel, Bénédict-Augustin 111 Morisot, Berthe 167–8, 172, 176–9 Daydreaming 172–3 Mme. Morisot and Her Daughter Mme. Pointillon (The Mother and Sister of the Artist) 180–1 ­Portrait of Mme. Marie Hubbard (1874) 177 ­Young Woman at a Window (The Artist’s Sister at a Window, 1869) 173–5 Morris, William 99 Muller, Johannes 121 Munch, Edvard, Puberty (1895) 186 Musée Grévin (Paris) 116 Museum of Natural Sciences and Botanical Garden 69, 71–2, 74, 224 n.24 Bommer, Jean-Édouard (J.E.) (1829–1895) 69, 72 Crépin, François (1831–1903) 69, 72 Destrée-Bommer, Elisa Caroline (1832–1910) 69, 72 Errera, Leo (1858–1905) 72 Hannon, Joseph-Désiré (1822–1870) 69 Marchal, Ėlie (1839–1923) 72 Nabi Brotherhood 40 Nahrath, Emilie 69 Naniez, D., “Les Chiennes d’Enfer Guidées part M’ame Pipelet (affair Vander Smissen),” 200 nationalism and cultural identity 161 naturalism 7, 14, 65, 156 Neo-Impressionism 85, 93, 107 Nero, Tom 153 Newbold, George 138 New University 73 Nolde, Emil (1867–1956) 99–100 nudes 164, 182–4, 188, 193 “Endless Pleasure” 184 profane and sacred 187–93 Ostend 54–6, 156–8 Circle Coecilia 94 Music Academy 223 n.73 “Queen of Seaside Resorts” 156 Rat Mort Society/Company of the Dead Rat 32, 94, 100, 159

249

Ostend-Dover boat ferry (1846) 55 Overloop, Jef (1878–1949) 99 Paerels, Willem (1872–1962) 207–8 Palace of Fine Arts (Brussels) 1, 86 Palace of Justice (Brussels) 89, 130, 148 Pantazis, Périclès (1849–84) 15, 84 Paris Salon (1882) 18, 27, 104, 165 parody 8, 30–3, 40–1, 115, 118, 137, 140, 156, 158, 194–5, 198, 207, 210 Pasteur, Louis 148, 155 germ theory 148–9 Peltzer, Armand 147 People’s House (Maison du Peuple) 126 Permeke, Louis 100 “Personal Service, Obligatory Instruction and Universal Suffrage” 144 Peter the Hermit 119 photographs/photography 20–4, 31, 42, 48, 68, 71, 73, 94, 150, 171, 184, 209 carte de visite 28 Ensor in his Studio (1932) 50 ­Ernest Rousseau Jr and Ensor in the Dunes near Ostend (c.1892) 71 James Ensor in His Studio (1896/97) 43 Photograph of James Ensor (c.1883) 22 portrait 21–3 physiognomics 14 Pica, Vittorio (1866–1930) 94 Picard, Edmond (1836–1924) 7, 31, 48, 80–1, 87–9, 92, 94, 97, 118, 131, 139, 147, 190 Ambidextrous Journalist 31 “Art and Revolution” 7 The Juror (Le Juré) 89, 118, 148 L’Art moderne, editor 31, 80–1, 87, 89 Maison d’Art (House of Art) 89, 96 Psukè 89 Theater of the House of Art 31, 89, 96 Pierrot 34, 40–6, 118, 137 Pilate, Pontius 40 Pippaff, “La Femme-Avocat,” Le Tirailleur 199 Piron, Herman 163 Plateau, Joseph 121 Poe, Edgar Allen (1809–1849) 93, 96, 141, 147, 154–5 The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar 153

250 Pontillon, Edma 173 Pontius, Paulus (1603–58) 28, 219 n.19 Popelin, Marie (1846–1913) 166, 198 Pope Pius IX 203 Portaels, Jean-Francois (1818–1895) 14, 34–5, 76, 120 Crucifixion (1885) 35 positivism 72, 127. See also socialism Compte, Auguste (1798–1857) 19 Littré, Émile (1801–1888) 18–20, 124, 127 Taine, Hippotaine (1828–1923) 19, 139 publicité 30, 195 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 186 Raffaëlli, Jean-François (1850–1924), The Absinthe Drinkers (Les Déclassés, 1881) 111–12 Rassenfosse, Armand (1862–1934) 94 rationalism 68 Rat Mort café (Paris) 94 realism 7–8, 14–17, 19, 21, 26, 29, 37, 53, 65–6, 111, 113, 168 recessions (1873–74 and 1899–1900) 2 Reclus, Élie (1827–1904) 72 Reclus, Ėlisée (1830–1905) 7, 72–3 Reclus-Dumesnil, Louise (1839–1917) 72 Redding, Victor 82 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 34–7, 39, 93, 120, 122, 127 Christ before Pilate (1636) 126 Christ Crucified between Two Thieves (The Three Crosses, 1653) 34 Crucifixion and Lamentation 39–40 The Three Crosses (1653) 126 Renan, Ernest (1823–1892) 37, 125–6 ­Life of Jesus 39 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, Portrait of Madame Claude Monet (1872) 176–7 Rinskopf, Léon (1862–1915) 158 Rivière, Henry 131 Roiti, Antonio 150 Rommelaere, Guillaume (1836–1916) 152 Rops, Félicien (1833–1898) 21–2, 66, 77, 79, 81, 87, 92, 97, 131, 138, 184, 186, 212 Civic Guard 138

Index “Le Plus Bel Amour de Don Juan” 186–7 Pornokratés/Pornocrates 84, 191, 212 Printemps (Spring) 138 Temptation of St. Anthony (1878) 131, 190–1 Uylenspiegel 138 Woman with Jumping Jack (1873, 1877, c.1883–85) 191 Rousseau, Blanche 18, 32 Rousseau, Ernest, Jr. (1872–1920) 22, 31, 66, 68–70, 72–3, 150, 197, 209 The Malacoderms of Belgium 70 primitive skeletal organisms, study 71 studies in medicine 70 Rousseau, Ernest, Sr. (1835–1905) 22, 66 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste (1829–1891) 66 Rousseau, Mariette (1850–1926) 12, 23–4, 31, 58, 64, 66, 68–9, 72, 74, 92, 123, 132, 150, 207–11 Rousseau, Omer (1836–1892) 66 Rousseau salon 72 de Greef, Guillaume (1842–1924) 72–3 Demolder, Eugène (1862–1919) 72 Destrée, Jules (1863–1941) 72 Lemonnier, Camile (1844–1913) 72, 88, 165–6 Massart, Jean (1865–1925) 72 Reclus-Dumesnil, Louise (1839–1917) 72 Reclus, Élie (1827–1904) 72 Reclus, Ėlisée (1830–1905) 7, 72–3 Solvay, Ernest (1838–1922) 72–3 VanderVelde, Emile (1866–1925) 72–3 Rowlandson, Thomas 153 Royal Academy (Brussels). See Academy of Fine Arts/Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Brussels) Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. See Museum of Natural Sciences Royal Conservatory of Music (Brussels) 158 At the Conservatory (1902) 157, 210 Cornélis-Servais, Ida (1855–1941) 158 Flament, Jeanne (1882–1956) 158 Gevaert, François-Auguste (1828–1908) 158 Rinskopf, Léon (1862–1915) 158 Wagner, Richard (1813–1883) 158

Index Ysaye, Eugène (1858–1931) 158 Royal Military Academy 66, 69,72 Leman, Gérard Matthieu (1851–1920) 72, 74, 207, 211 Royal Society of Watercolorists 79 ­Royal Theater at the Gallery Saint Hubert (Brussels) 32 Royal Theater (Liege) 100 Rubens, Peter-Paul (1577–1640) 28–9 Ruskin, John 99 Russian Ballet (Diaghilev) 223 n.73 Sacré, Joseph (1829–1915) 152 Saint-Saens, Camille 226 n.11 Salatino, Kevin 212 Salon des Cent (Paris) 50, 89, 93–4, 96–8, 215 Schlobach, Willy (1864–1951) 76, 82 Schongauer, Martin 191 School of Decorative Arts (Brussels) 95 Schopenhauer, Arthur 121 Schumann, Robert 131 Sélection 100 self-portraits (Ensor) 7–8, 11, 51, 53, 76–7, 159, 164, 182, 215–16. See also skeleton self-portraits (Ensor) aid of mirror 16–20 Ensor as Christ (see Christ, Ensor as) “expressive” interiors and social self 24–7 interpretive and expressive role 51 masquerade, intrigue 30–2 master of disguise 33–4 to Naturalism and Realist theory 14–15, 17, 19 performance and self-promotion 12–13, 27, 51 public identity 11, 17, 164 rebel with cause 27–30 repoussoir element 27, 134 selfie narratives 20–4 self-representations 15, 29, 36, 40, 44, 46, 49–50 studio dialectics 13–16 subterfuge and self-fashioning 27 self-portraits (Ensor) works Big Head (1879) 16–17 Call of the Siren (1891/93) 46–8, 197 Dangerous Cooks (1896) 41–2, 87–9, 92, 151

251

Ecce Homo (Christ and the Critics) 40, 49 Ensor is a fool (Ensor est un Fou) 33, 150, 208 Haunted Chimney/Fireplace (1888) 24–5, 50, 182–3 Little Head (Portrait of the Artist, 1879) 17 My Portrait in 1960 (1888) 45 My Sad and Splendid Portrait (1886) 24, 182 The Pisser (1887) 33, 113, 150, 208 Self Portrait (1884) 12, 14 Self Portrait at the Easel (1879) 14, 16–17, 50 Self-Portrait (c. 1883) 22 Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (1890) 41–2 ­Self Portrait “Pas fini” (“Not finished”) 24–5, 27 Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (My Disguised Portrait, 1883/1888) 28–30, 82, 196 Self-Portrait with Masks (1899) 29–31, 50, 100 Still Life with Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (c.1930) 51 Seurat, George 85, 93 “Messiah of the New Art” 86 pointillism 86 Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte (1884) 85 Shiff, Richard 218 n.13 Sidney, James 57–8 Signac, Paul, The Dining Room (Opus 152, 1886–87) 107–8 skeleton self-portraits (Ensor) 23–4, 46 My Skeletonized Portrait (1889) 23, 45 Skeleton Drawing Fine Pranks (1889) 45 Skeleton in a Mirror (1890) 46 The Skeleton Painter (1896) 42–4, 100 Skeletons Fighting over Pickled Herring (1891) 41 Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man (1891) 116–17, 196, 198–9 Snow, John 149 social and political environment 9

252

Index

socialism 5–6, 124, 126–7, 136–7, 139. See also positivism anarcho-socialism 7, 80–1, 89, 99, 103, 122 Belgian Workers Party, BWP (Belgische Werkliedenpartij/Parti Ouvrier Belge) 6, 9, 34, 124–6, 136–7, 145, 166, 224 n.12 “Down with the Clergy” (“A bas la Calotte”) 124 “It will go (or work)” (“Ca Ira”) 124 Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921) 7 Le Petit, Alfred, “The Hydra of Socialism in Belgium” 6 Reclus, Élie (1827–1904) 72 Reclus, Élisée (1830–1905) 7, 72–3 Socialist Manifestation of August 15 (1886) 125 social network 53–4 Brussels (metropolis of modernity) 65 of home 56–65 (see also family) Les XX (see Les Vingt/Les XX) Ostend 54–6 Rousseau family 65–75 social responsibility (artist) 20, 26 social themes and critique 10, 103–61 Christ’s Entry into Brussels 1889 135–40 contagion 148–61 light as social allegory 118–22 politic of religious allegory 122–30 private spaces, public meaning 104–8 satire and politics (Belgium) 141–8 signs, banners, and flags 124 temptation and modernity 130–5 theater of artifice 114–18 working-class life 108–14 ­Société Libre des Beaux-Arts (Free Society of Fine Arts) 15, 65, 79 Hermans, Charles (1839–1924) 15 Society of Aquafortistes 66 Solvay, Ernest (1838–1922) 72–3 Solvay, Lucien 21 Solvay Group 22 Spilliaert, Léon 100 Stanley, Henry (1841–1904) 3 Steen, Jan 28 Stevens, Alfred (1823–1906) 169, 171–2 Young Woman and Japanese Screen (c. 1880) 169–70

Stevens, Arthur 90 Stiénon, L. 153 Stolz, Alban (1808–88) 133 Storck, Henri 163 Storm van’s-Gravesande, Carel Nicholaas (1841–1924) 79 Stout, William, The Bathers (1882) 186 Strauss, David Friedrich, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined 125–6 Stremel, Max (1859–1928) 95 subjectivity and artistic agency 8, 11, 17–20, 51, 103, 114, 161, 173, 178, 182 Sue, Eugène, The Mysteries of Paris (1843) 199 Sulzberger, Max 40, 88 symbolism 8, 10, 26, 37, 99, 118, 156, 161, 164, 178, 218 n.13 Taine, Hippolyte (1828–1923) 19–20, 139 Tarde, Gabriel 139 theater of artifice 114–18, 130 Theater of the House of Art 31, 89, 96 Théâtre des Champs Elysées (Paris) 223 n.73 Thiriar, Jules-Adrien (1846–1913) 152 Thomassin, Philippe 198 Tokkir, Bernard 100 Toone Marionette Theater (Brussels) 31 Toorop, Jan (1858–1928) 81–2, 84, 91, 94 tourism 55–6 Tout du Monde 188 travesty 9, 29–30, 44, 46, 74, 88, 115–16, 118, 137, 147, 195, 197 Tricot, Xavier 51, 55 Triennial salon 65, 83, 95, 205 Turner, J.M.W. (1775–1851) 122 Ultramontanism/Ultramontane 34, 122, 133, 219 n.28 Stolz, Alban (1808–88), Vie des Saints 133 Universal Exhibitions 72, 90, 95, 116 Paris (1889) 66 Universitè Libre (ULB/Free University) 65, 68–9, 152, 166 Crocq, Jean-Joseph (1824–1898) 152 Freemasons 72 Rousseau, Ernest, Jr. (1872–1920) 69–70, 72–3

Index Rousseau, Ernest, Sr. (1835–1905) 66, 69 Sacré, Joseph (1829–1915) 152 ­Solvay, Ernest (1838–1922) 72 Thiriar, Jules-Adrien (1846–1913) 152 urban spaces 65, 132, 139 Vaes, Walter (1882–1958) 99 van Beers, Jan (1852–1927) 21, 46, 79, 197 Le Yacht “la Sirène”, or La Sirène 21 The Timid One or Sea Bathing At Ostende (Aux Bains de Mer) 46–8 Van Campenhout Imprimerie 97, 150 Van Cutsem, Henri (1839–1904) 95 Van Damme, Suzanne 209 Van der Borght, Jean 100 van der Stappen, Charles (1843–1910) 87–8 VanderVelde, Emile (1866–1925) 72–3 Vandervelde, Paul 152–3 van der Weyden, Rogier 39, 203 van de Velde, Henry (1863–1957) 100 Van Gogh, Vincent 40 Van Hecke, Peter-Gabriel (1887–1967) 100 vanitas 41, 44–5, 62, 115 van Lerberghe, Charles (1861–1907) 117–18 Van Nu en Straks (Of Now and Tomorrow) (1893–1901) 96, 160 van Rysselberghe, Théo (1862–1926) 81–2, 85, 87, 90 van Strydonck, Guillaume (1861–1937) 76, 81–2 Verdavainne, Georges 82 Verhaeren, Emile (1855–1918) 16, 31, 80–1, 83–5, 88–9, 91–2, 94, 97, 104, 127, 205, 221 n.36, 221 n.37 Verhaert, Piet 82 Verheyden, Isidoor, The Artist James Ensor (1886) 49 Verlaine, Paul 202 Vermeylen, August (1872–1945) 94, 96, 160 Verne, Jules 127 Verstraeten, Edmond 95 Vie et Lumière 99 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste (1838–1889) 198 Claire Lenoir (1867) 198

253

Contes Cruels (Cruel Tales) 198 Tribulat Bonhomet (1887) 198 vivisection 153, 155 Vogels, Guillaume (1836–1896) 15, 79, 81–2, 87, 122 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 121, 159 von Helmholtz, Hermann 121 Vooruit (“Forward”) 6, 124 Vos, Charles (1860–1939) 32 Vriamont, Georges (1896–1961) 100, 223 n.72 Vuillard, Édouard 100 Wagner, Richard 120, 131, 134, 158, 210 “Ride of the Valkyrie” 131 Wagnerism 158 Whistler, James 84, 171–2 Harmony in Grey and Green: no.3: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872–74) 171 ­Wiertz, Antoine, The Just (Le Juste) 126 women friendships Berniêres, Claude 164, 209 Boogaerts, Augusta (1870–1951) 48, 99, 164, 207–12 Hertoge, Blanche (1884–1951) 164 Lambotte, Emma (1878–1963) 97, 99, 164, 209–10 Rousseau, Mariette (1850–1926) 12, 23–4, 31, 58, 64, 66, 72, 74, 92, 132, 150, 164, 207–11 women imagery (Ensor) works 9, 163, 164, 188–9, 213 Astonishment of the Mask Wouse (1887–89) 115–16, 196–8, 206 Bronze Pot with Apparitions (1880–85/1886–88) 182–3 Children at Their Morning Toilette (Children Dressing, 1886) 184–5, 187, 210 The Comical Smokers (1920) 207, 209–11 The Convalescent (1880–81) 165 Devils Thrashing Angels and Archangels (Fight of the Demons, 1889) 150, 191–2, 224 n.21 Diana (1877) 183, 186 Endless Pleasure 184 “Etude de lumière” (Study in Light) 187 The Flaying (L’Échorché)/Flaying a Convict (1888) 191

254

Index

The Intrigue (1890) 195–6 Judith and Holofernes (1879) 192 The Lady in Blue (Portrait of Madame Duhot, 1906) 209 The Lady in Distress (1882) 165, 175, 177–8, 196, 206 The Lady in Grey (1881) 165, 171, 179 Lady with a Fan (1880) 165, 169–73 Lady with a Red Parasol (1880) 165, 171 Masks Mocking Death (Masks Confronting Death, 1888) 194–6, 206 Melancholy Fishwives (1892) 199 Mona Lisa among the Masks (1934) 209 My Dead Mother 209 Nude with Balustrade (1880–85/1886– 88) 182 Nude with Curtain (1886–88) 182 Nymph Embracing a Herm (1920) 184 Old Woman with Masks (Theater of Masks or Bouquet d’ Artifice, 1889) 193–4, 196, 198, 208–9 Our Two Portraits (c.1905) 208–9, 212 Portrait of Augusta Boogaerts (1939) 209 Portrait of Madame Albert Croquez (1927) 209 Portrait of Madeline Lambotte (The Lady with a Straw Hat, 1909) 209 The Queen Parysatis Flaying a Eunnuch (1899) 189, 224 n.21 Seated Portrait of Augusta Boogaerts or La Sirène (c.1930) 209 Seated Young Woman (1880) 109, 167 “Seule” (“Alone”) 174 Singular Masks (1892) 196 The Somber Lady (1881) 165, 171–2, 174 ­Surly Countenance (1890) 62, 206 The Torture of Joan of Arc (1892) 204–5 Triumph of Death (1887) 200 Virgin of Consolation (1892) 39, 41, 202–5, 211 Waiting (1882) 165 The Wizard’s Squall 190, 211 Woman near Curtain 183–4 Woman with Blue Shawl (1881) 60, 66

Woman Writing a Letter (1883) 61, 207 Women with a Red Shawl (1880) 165, 167, 171 women subjects 9, 213 artifice 19, 21, 23, 29, 50–1, 193–7 divine feminine 202–5 at home 165–8 Joan of Arc 9, 204–5, 210 Marianne 137, 143, 164, 197–205, 210 New Woman 197, 203, 207–8, 211 nudes 164, 182–4, 188, 193 Parysatis, Queen 188–9 profane and sacred 187–93 Sheba, Queen 188–90 works (Ensor). See also self-portraits (Ensor) works; women imagery (Ensor) works; women subjects Adam and Eve Chased from Paradise (1887) 129 The Adieux of Napoleon (1897) 160 After Dinner in Ostend (Afternoon in Ostend) (1881) 105–6, 112, 163, 165–6, 179 The Artist Willy Finch Standing at His Easel (1882) 78 The Assassination (1890) 153–5 At the Conservatory (1902) 157–8, 210 Attributes of the Fine Arts (Attributes of the Studio) (1889) 183, 198 The Bad Doctors (1892) 151–3, 155, 158 Bathers 48 Baths of Ostend (1890) 56, 156–7, 160, 201, 212 The Battle of the Golden Spurs (1891) 159–60 Belgium in the Nineteenth Century (1889) 37, 144–6, 159, 201 Bourgeois Salon (1880) 64, 165, 180 The Cathedral (1886) 85, 96, 139–40, 159, 221 n.36 Chez Miss/Russian Music (At mademoiselle’s, 1880–81) 77, 83, 104–5, 165 Chinoiseries with Fans (1880) 181 Christ and the Cripple (1880, 1885–86) 121 Christ Calming the Storm (1891) 129

Index Christ Comes to the Aid of St. Anthony (1901) 224 n.21 Christ Walking on Water (1885) 128, 209 A Colorist (1880) 27, 60, 95, 165, 171, 173, 207 Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved, c.1917–18) 41, 158–9 The Cuirassiers of Waterloo (1891) 159 ­Dead Rooster (1894) 91 Demons Teasing Me (1888) 49, 93, 163 Destroying Angel (1889) 212 The Devils Dzitts and Hihahox Commanded by Crazon Riding a Furious Cat, Leading Christ to Hell (1886) 96 The Doctor’s Visit 153 Doctrinal Nourishment (1889) 37, 144–6, 150, 159, 212 The Drunkards (1883) 110–14 Ensor and General Leman Discussing Painting (1890) 74, 197, 207, 209, 211 Ernest Rousseau (1887) 68, 70 The Fall of the Rebellious Angels (1889) 86, 129, 150 Fort Napoleon (1876) 55 Fort Wellington (1876) 55 Fridolin and Gragapança of Yperdamme (1895) 92 The Gay: The Adoration of the Shepherds (1886) 126 The Gendarmes (1892) 142–3, 151, 201–2 Gluttony (1904) 158 Haunted Armoire (The Old Dresser) 182 Hector Denis (1890) 73 Hop-Frog’s Revenge 96 Indignant bourgeois whistling Wagner in 1880 in Brussels (1890) 158 The Infernal Cortege (1886–87) 150 Interior with Three Portraits (1938) 50 La Gamme d’Amour (The Scale of Love) 32, 100, 223 n.72, 223 n.73 The Lamplighter (1880) 77, 97, 109–10 In the Land of Colors (renamed The Oyster Eater) 79, 82, 97, 99, 106–8, 165, 178–9, 206, 210

255 Les XX catalog (1888) 28 Letter to Octave Maus (1887) 45–6 Liber Veritas 63 The Lively and the Radiant: The Entry into Jerusalem (The Entry into Jerusalem) (1885) 85, 122–7, 129, 136–7, 139–40, 160 Man with a Cauldron (c.1880) 108–9 Massacre of the Ostend Fisherman (The Strike, 1888) 141, 159, 200, 212 Me and My Circle (1939) 53, 54 Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Speak with Sophie Yoteko (1892) 74–5, 196–7 “My Life in Brief ” 57 My Preferred Room (1892) 49 Mystic Death of the Theologian (1880, 1885–86) 76, 118–22 Napoleon’s Last Stand (1889) 160 The Old Rascals (1895) 153, 211 The Old Window in the King’s Stables 55 The Orchard (1886) 95 The Oyster Eater 79, 82, 97, 99, 106–8, 165, 178–9, 206, 210 Painters Getting to Grips (1938) 209 Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around! (1888) 150–1, 156, 207 Point of the Compass (1932) 51 ­Portrait of Emile Verhaeren (1890) 91–2 Portrait of the Artist’s Father (1881) 56–8 Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1882) 59 Portrait of My Aunt (Mimi) (1886–88) 61–2 Portrait of Théo Hannon (1882) 67, 79, 92 Portrait of Willy Finch (1882) 78, 79, 92 The Remorse of the Ogre of Corsica (1890–91) 160 Resting in the Studio (1938) 209 Roman Victory (1891) 86, 97, 159 Scandalized Masks (1883) 113–15, 183, 197–8, 210 The Scavenger 150 The Seven Capital Sins (1904) 150, 158

256

Index

Sick Tramp Trying to Warm Himself (1882) 89, 97, 113 Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves (1889) 115–16 Sketchbook page (Carnet Rousseau, c.1882) 13, 70 Sloth or Laziness (La Paresse, 1888–89) 62 Small Bizarre Figures (1888) 71–3, 150 Small Persian Torture (1893) 193 Still Life with Blue Pitcher (1891–92) 41 Stove Sitter (Une Fumiste) 109 Studio of James Ensor (1930) 50 Study for Entry of Christ into Jerusalem (1885) 123 The Teasing of Saint Anthony (1932/33) 224 n.21 The Temptation of St. Anthony (1887–88) 64, 76, 85, 132, 135–6, 139, 141, 150, 188, 191–2, 211, 224 n.21, 224 n.22 “Three Weeks at the Academy” 11, 27, 32, 75, 80, 90, 100, 120

Tribulations of St. Anthony (1887, 1909) 100, 131–2, 150, 190, 224 n.21 Twelve Etchings 97 The Vile Vivisectors (1925) 155 Villa Albert (1876) 55 Virgin of Consolation (1892) 39, 41, 202–5, 211 Visions: The Halos of Christ or the Sensibilities of Light 39, 44, 76, 85, 122, 127–8, 136, 140 The Wise Judges (1891) 49, 87, 146, 148, 151, 153 Wouters, Rik (1882–1916) 99 Wystman, Rudolph (1860–1927) 76 Ysaye, Eugène (1858–1931) 158 Yseux, Emile (1835–1915) 152 Zola, Emile (1840–1902) 14, 66 L’Œuvre (The Work) 83 zwanze, zwanzism 32–4, 74, 117–18, 219 n.25

257

258

259

260

261

262

Plate 1  James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888, oil on canvas, 252.7 × 430.5 cm, Los Angeles, J. P. Getty Museum, inv. 87.PA.96 (photo: Image courtesy of the J. P. Getty’s Open Content Program)

Plate 2  James Ensor, A Colorist, 1880, oil on canvas, 102 × 82 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Plate 3  James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat (My Disguised Portrait), 1883/1888, 76.5 × 61.5 cm, Ostend, Mu.ZEE (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 4  James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Masks, 1899, oil on canvas, 117 × 82 cm, Aichi, Japan, Menard Art Museum (© photo: Menard Art Museum)

Plate 5  James Ensor, The Dangerous Cooks, 1896, oil on panel, 38 × 46 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

Plate 6  James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, 1891, 16 × 21.5 cm, oil on panel, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Plate 7  James Ensor, The Bourgeois Salon, 1881, oil on canvas, 133 × 109 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 8  James Ensor, Ensor and Leman Discussing Painting, 1890, oil on panel, 12 × 16 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

Plate 9  James Ensor, Monsieur and Madame Rousseau Speak with Sophie Yoteko, 1892, oil on panel, 12 × 16 cm, Bruges, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

Plate 10  James Ensor, Portrait of Emile Verhaeren (Verhaeren Sharpening a Pencil), 1890, oil on panel, 25 × 18 cm, Brussels, Royal Library (KBR), Cabinet Verhaeren, Cabv 00051 (photo: ©AML, Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Brussels)

Plate 11  James Ensor, Icon (Portrait of Eugène Demolder), 1893, oil, pencil and gouache on panel, 36 × 21 cm, Bruges, Groeningemuseum (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 12  James Ensor, Chez Miss/Russian Music, 1880–81, oil on canvas, 133 × 110 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Plate 13  James Ensor, Oyster Eater, 1882, oil on canvas, 207 × 150 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 14  James Ensor, Scandalized Masks, 1883, oil on canvas, 135 × 112 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Plate 15  James Ensor, Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, 1887–89, oil on canvas, 109 × 131 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 16  James Ensor, Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889, oil on canvas, 74.8 × 60 cm, AP 1981 20, Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum (© 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels, Kimbell Art Museum, photo: courtesy Kimbell Art Museum)

Plate 17  James Ensor, The Lively and the Radiant: The Entry into Jerusalem, 1885, black and brown crayon and collage on paper, mounted on canvas, 206 × 150.3 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo Hugo Maertens)

Plate 18  James Ensor, Adam and Eve Chased From Paradise, 1887, oil on canvas, 205 × 245 cm, Antwerp, KSMKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 19  James Ensor, Tribulations of St. Anthony, 1887, oil on canvas, 117.8 × 167.6 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

Plate 20 James Ensor, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1887–88, colored pencil, mixed media, collage on 51 sheets of paper, 179.5 × 154.7 cm, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago (© The Art Institute of Chicago, photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY)

Plate 21  James Ensor, Massacre of the Ostend Fishermen (August 1887) or The Strike, 1888, pencil and color pencil on paper, mounted on board, 34 × 67.5 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 22  James Ensor, Belgium in the Nineteenth Century, 1889, pencil and colored pencil on paper, mounted on panel, 16.3 × 21.4 cm, Brussels, Royal Library (KBR), Print Cabinet (© KBR photo: Brussels, KBR)

Plate 23  James Ensor, Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around!, 1888, conté crayon and colored pencil on paper, 26.2 × 39.2 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost)

Plate 24  James Ensor, Baths of Ostend, 1890, black crayon, colored pencil and oil on panel, 37.5 × 45.5 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Dominique Provost)

Plate 25  James Ensor, Battle of the Golden Spurs, 1891, crayon, mixed media, on prepared panel, 37.3 × 46.1 cm, Brussels, RMFAB (© RMFAB, photo: J. Geleyns-Art Photography)

Plate 26  James Ensor, The Lady in Distress, 1882, oil on canvas, 100.5 × 80 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, photo: Stéphane Maréchalle)

Plate 27  James Ensor, Children at Their Morning Toilette (Children Dressing), 1886, oil on canvas, 136 × 110 cm, on depot Ghent, MSK, Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap (© www. artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 28  James Ensor, Old Woman with Masks, 1889, oil on canvas, 54 × 47.5 cm, Ghent, MSK (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 29  James Ensor, Masks Mocking Death, 1888, oil on canvas, 81.3 × 100.3 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

Plate 30  James Ensor, The Intrigue, 1890, oil on canvas, 90 × 150 cm, Antwerp, KMSKA (© www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens)

Plate 31  James Ensor, The Virgin of Consolation, 1892, oil on panel, 40 × 38 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds)

Plate 32  James Ensor, The Comical Smokers, 1920, oil on canvas, 77 × 66 cm, Belgium, Private collection (© Mercatorfonds, photo: Hugo Maertens, Bruges, courtesy Mercatorfonds)