Biography
James Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker who, aside from short trips to Paris, London and Holland, spent his entire life in Ostend, where he was born in 1860. He gave up on school at the age of fifteen and went on to study at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels until 1880, first exhibiting in 1881. While his early works favoured a realist style, he swiftly moved on to depicting expressionist allegories of increasingly bizarre subject matter, often featuring masks, carnivals and skeletons. In 1888 he began to turn to religious themes, which he secularized scandalously, identifying Christ as a figure of tortured mockery. In 1929 he was made Baron Ensor, and in 1933 was awarded the Legion of Honour. Though his interest in painting depleted with age, he is considered a major innovator of the art of the nineteenth century, dying in Ostend a much-respected man in 1949.
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