JAMES ENSOR
James Ensor was born in Ostend, Belgium on Friday, April 13, 1860. His parents were both Belgian, and he owned a curio shop, from which he acquired many ideas for paintings. During carnivals at Ostend, masks were also on sale there, and Ensor never forgot them. He later wrote how he felt about his childhood at the shop: "I was even more fascinated by our dark and frightening attic, full of horrible spiders, curios, seashells, plants and animals from distant seas, beautiful chinaware, rust and blood-colored effects, red and white coral, monkeys, turtles, dried mermaids and stuffed Chinamen."
Ensor began painting when he was sixteen, mostly of shore landscapes at his seaside town. In 1877, he went to the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium. He was bored by the formal teachings there, and did things to demonstrate his independence. One of these was this incident: "I was told to paint the bust of Octavius, the most august of the Roman emperors, from a brand-new plaster cast. The snow-white plaster made my flesh creep. I turned it into bright pink goose-flesh and made the hair red horrifying the other students, and their initial alarm was followed by cat-calls, grins, and punches. The teachers were so taken aback by my impudence that they did not dwell on the fact and from then on I painted freely from living models." He strongly disliked the art academy, and complained of never being to do his own art experiments. Later, he said this of his school, "In 1880, I emerged unceremoniously from that place full of short sighted creatures, already saturated with antiques, satiated [stuffed], lashed by the compliments rapped out by my foul mouthed teachers."
It was apparent, even then, that Ensor had much skill as a painter. His first paintings, which were slightly influenced by impressionism, were rejected by the salons because they portrayed subjects too realistically. All these early paintings were of an overall dark tone. In 1884, he began painting with brighter colors, as is apparent in The Entry of Christ into Brussels and Skeleton Painter in his Atelier. This same year he helped form Les XX, or The Twenty, a group of radical Belgian artists. After this time, Ensor's paintings grew more bizarre and stayed that way throughout his career. These strange and often times grotesque paintings are what he is mainly associated with today.