The Baron of Souvenirs

In Belgium last fortnight an 82-year-old gentleman who has been described as "the greatest modern Belgian artist . . . the first of the Expressionists ... a pre-Surrealist" was reported dead. He was Baron James Ensor, the son of an Englishman who sold sea shells and other souvenirs in a little shop at Ostend.

For 70 years James Ensor, who never set foot out of Belgium, remained an English citizen. In 1930 Belgium's King Albert created Ensor a baron for his contribution to Belgium's esthetic reputation. Ensor became a Belgian. A street was named after him in his native Ostend. A tablet was placed on the wall of his house saying that he lived there. A statue of him was erected in Ostend's Casino Gardens. He unveiled it himself.

When James Ensor was 19 he painted portraits from a palette like that of America's Albert Pinkham Ryder (then 32), two years later bourgeois interiors in the expressionistic manner of Jean Edouard Vuillard (then 14). At 29 Ensor painted a horse careening across a sky a la Marc Chagall (then 2). Fifty-four years ago Ensor scandalized even the most audacious art lovers with his Entry of Christ into Brussels. This canvas showed a vast crowd of leering men & women, one a skeleton, others with masks, around a hardly noticeable Christ, abject upon a mule.

Until recently, James Ensor kept open his father's little Ostend souvenir shop, did an average business of 35 francs a day. Before the war the painter was heavily represented in the museums of Antwerp, Brussels, Dresden and Vienna, and not at all in the museums of England, where he held his first British exhibition at the age of 76.

In the U.S. there are at least two important Ensors: his Tribulation of St. Anthony (1887), thrown out of the Cologne Museum by the Nazis as being "too modern," is now owned by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art; his Intrigue (1890), owned by the Royal Museum of Antwerp, is in the Museum of Modern Art's safekeeping.

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