James Ensor was a Belgian painter, born in Ostend in 1860 and dead there in 1949, who filled his canvases with carnival masks, skeletons and jeering crowds. He grew up above his family's souvenir shop, where the masks were sold, and he is remembered above all for Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, a huge painting that Brussels would not show for forty-one years.
He spent almost his whole life in one seaside town on the Belgian coast. Everything he is famous for was already in the shop downstairs.
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In 1888 James Ensor finished the biggest painting of his life, a canvas more than four meters wide. It showed Jesus riding into Brussels and disappearing into a carnival mob of masks, banners and brass bands. Ensor had helped found Les XX, an avant-garde exhibition society, five years earlier, and he meant the painting for it. Les XX never hung it.
The painting stayed in Ensor's hands. It was not shown to the public until 1929, forty-one years after he painted it, and that was the year King Albert made him a baron.
So the country that had kept his masterpiece off its walls ended up honouring the man who painted it. The painting itself now hangs in Los Angeles.
What You'll Discover
Where the masks really came from.
Why Brussels never hung his masterpiece.
Who leads the parade in bishop's robes.
Why he drew himself in a grave.
What the masks might be hiding.
Who dined with Ensor in 1933.