Dix-Neuf

Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes

ISSN: (Print) 1478-7318 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ydix20

Between the Studio and the Salon: The Intimate

Theatre of James Ensor’s Interiors

Susan M. Canning

To cite this article: Susan M. Canning (2018) Between the Studio and the Salon:
The Intimate Theatre of James Ensor’s Interiors, Dix-Neuf, 22:3-4, 222-244, DOI:
10.1080/14787318.2019.1586320

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2019.1586320

Published online: 02 Apr 2019.

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DIX-NEUF
2018, VOL. 22, NOS. 3–4, 222–244
https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2019.1586320

Between the Studio and the Salon: The Intimate Theatre of

James Ensor’s Interiors
Susan M. Canning
Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In the 1880s the Belgian artist James Ensor painted a number of Intimacy; the studio; the
interiors that map out a geography of the home and its home; class; theatre;
compelling discourses of public and private, gender and class, subjectivity; the body
intimacy and interiority. Some of these interiors observe with
direct, realist regard the Ensor family salon, a space then allied
with the feminine sphere and middle-class values, where the
artist, his sister, mother and aunt can be seen performing the
rituals, decorum and tedium of petit bourgeois life. Later in
the decade, Ensor transforms these interior views into theatre-like
stages with tilting floors and wings filled with puppet figures,
props, costumes, instruments, and masks. Merging the studio with
the salon and observation with artifice, these later interiors serve
as spaces of performance where Ensor gives form to his
subjectivity and imagination while also engaging in social
commentary and critique. This essay will examine the intimate
theatre of Ensor’s interiors and the social and symbolic meaning
and expressive potential that he found in this exchange between
body and place, studio and salon.

From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private man, rep-
resents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago.
His living room is a box in the theatre of the world.
Walter Benjamin, from ‘Louis Philippe, or the Interior’, in Paris the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century (Benjamin 2002, 9)

For many nineteenth century artists and writers, the interior served as a familiar dis-
cursive frame for probing the complex narratives circulating in modern experience. As
a record of accumulation, materialism and desire, the interior left traces of the cultural pri-
orities and values associated with the domestic sphere; as a social space it recorded the
public and private decorum of gender and class; and as a place of privacy and personal
subjectivity, it underscored the increasing importance of intimacy and interiority,
especially in the last decades of the century. As Benjamin notes, in the exchange
between body and place within the interior one can discover an intimate theatre filled
with social and symbolic meaning.

CONTACT Susan M. Canning provonyc@rcn.com 575 Grand St. E 906, New York, New York 10002
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 DIX-NEUF 223

By mid-century, the home, often allied with the domestic sphere and women’s experi-
ence, had become a place of refuge and retreat from the demands of a more and more
complex modern experience (Singletary 2008, 31–33). As the century progressed,
debates over meaning of the home, the need to promote and strengthen its connection
to family values and the significance of private, interior experience only increased,
especially among those threatened by the rise of the ‘new woman’ and the working
class. By the end of the nineteenth century, the home and its interior had become
affiliated not only with the social ideals of family, order, stability and bourgeois individu-
alism but also with a desire for intimacy, privacy and a preoccupation with interior states
of being (Silverman 1977, 1989; Sidlauskas 2000; Clayson 2009, Parchall 2009). Reflecting
these shifting social anxieties and new priorities associated with the interior, domestic
scenes and particularly representations of the public spaces of the home were popular sub-
jects often on view at the salon.
For his first public exhibitions at official salons in Paris and Brussels and Brussels-based
alternative venues La Chrysalide (The Chrysalis) and Les Vingt (Les XX) (The Twenty), the
Belgian artist James Ensor showed several large paintings of domestic interiors. These
works, set mainly in the family home in Ostend, offered a persuasive introduction to
Ensor’s contemporary milieu, amply demonstrating his talent as an artist and painter of
modern Belgian life. Merging subjectivity with a frank regard of his surroundings,
Ensor’s early interiors explored the decorum and experience of middle-class life,
mapping out for public consumption a geography of the home and its compelling dis-
courses of public and private, gender and class, intimacy and interiority. As his artistic
practice grew more evocative and Symbolist in the early 1890s, Ensor’s representation
of the interior became more dramatic and theatrical with stage-like formats, props, cos-
tumes, instruments, masks and puppet-like figures. Unlike the earlier interiors observed
from life, these works, composed entirely in the studio, presented the interior as a
private, even intimate place of fantasy and artifice. Merging the studio with
the salon, these later interiors operated as spaces of performance where Ensor gave
form to his subjective imaginings while also engaging in satire, social commentary and
critique.
Rather than the family salon, one of Ensor’s earliest interiors, The Colorist (Figure 1),
represents his private studio. Located above the family souvenir store on the ground floor
and the living spaces of the middle floors of his home in Ostend, the rather cramped space
of this attic studio barely accommodated the tall, lanky artist, his easel, paintings and
props. In The Colorist, a young woman, the artist’s sister, Marie Carolina Emma
‘Mitche’ Ensor, is seated in profile in this studio interior wearing a white day dress or
robe d’intérieur.1 Clutching a fan, Mitche looks downward as if lost in thought, her
figure set in shadows against bright contre-jour lighting streaming into the room from a
partially shuttered window. The warm sunlight delineates the room’s furnishings and
accessories including a stove, an iron pot topped by a portfolio and pile of wood, a pedestal
with several fans (and possibly a bonnet) and below, in the right foreground, an artist’s
palette. At the upper left, a mirror and easel can be seen, along with an additional chair
placed along the painting’s left edge. The palette, viewed from above as if held by the
artist, acts as a repoussoir element that invites the observer into the studio to gaze at
both the seated Mitche and behind her a self-portrait of Ensor in the mirror. Joined in
a complex circulation and exchange of glances between the viewer, the artist and
224 S. M. CANNING

Figure 1. James Ensor, The Colorist (1880, Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) © Royal Museums of
Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns - Art Photography © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

Mitche, Ensor’s painting presents the studio interior as a place of reflection, invention and
performance.
Seeming absorbed with her fan and unaware of the observer’s gaze, Mitche appears soli-
tary and pensive, her singular aspect underscored by the painting’s original title ‘Seule’
(Alone).2 A closer look shows Mitche occupied with the work of painting a fan by
hand, an activity more connected to later title, The Colorist and Ensor’s own take on a
popular theme. Unlike paintings by contemporaries like the Belgian Alfred Stevens
(The Japanese Parisian, c.1872, Liège: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain,) or
the French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (At the Ball, 1875 París: Musée Marmottan
Monet) depicting interiors where fashionable women or models hold fans, an accessory
commonly associated with flirtation and display, Ensor’s view describes a scene of dom-
estic labour that also speaks to the constraints of gender. Even if by the 1870s fan painting
had become an acceptable creative activity for ladies of the leisure class – Morisot even
painted a few – for Mitche, a woman of petit bourgeois status who, unlike her brother,
could not study at the Academy and who quite possibly, as the painting suggests, had
been taught by him, painting a fan would be a way to earn extra income. Indeed, the
fan that is the focus of Mitche’s activity could soon be an item for sale in the family sou-
venir shop on the ground floor just a few stories below its site of production in Ensor’s
studio.
 DIX-NEUF 225

Even if Ensor’s painting reiterates contemporary attitudes towards women’s work, it

also recognizes the concentration and consideration that a colorist must bring to her
task. Seen at a respectful distance within the studio rather than the more accessible
public space of the family shop and surrounded by artist’s materials and props and
even his reflected presence similarly at work making this painting, Ensor invites contem-
plation of their mutual creative endeavours. At the same time, the painting’s focus on
Mitche’s separateness and inward pose – perhaps she has paused in her work for a
moment of daydreaming – lends the whole an aura of contemplation and quiet reflection.
Indeed, Mitche’s activity may be mundane or hardly unique (as suggested by the other fans
on the pedestal), yet by picturing her as a woman in an interior immersed in solitary
thought, Ensor offers the viewer an identification with and insight into women’s experi-
ence rarely portrayed by male artists of this period.3
The Colorist’s informal presentation and unusual subject transforms what was no doubt
a familiar scene for Ensor and his sister into a provocative look into the studio where a
descriptive observation in colour and light of a fan painter busy at her task joins with
an evocative temporality and inactive pose to explore the subjectivity, reflective solitude
and self-absorption of everyday life. This exchange within the studio between looking,
imagining and expressive exploration makes it clear that already at the beginning of his
career Ensor recognizes the interior as a space where observation and personal imagin-
ation co-exist.
Other interiors painted at this time depict the salon or parlour, the home’s most public
rooms, filled with the amenities of middle-class comfort, including upholstered chairs,
thick velvet curtains, gas lanterns, gilded mirrors and elaborately patterned carpets. At
first glance, Ensor’s examination of the decorum and circumstance of the bourgeois
salon seems to focus on the room and its accessories. But as with The Colorist, he also
invites the observer to look close and consider the occupants, mostly women, seen from
a discreet distance busy with mundane, everyday activities such as reading, sewing, drink-
ing tea and playing the piano.
One of Ensor’s earliest treatments of this subject, The Bourgeois Salon (Figure 2), brings
the artist down from his attic studio and into the parlour of the family home at 23 Vlaan-
derenstraat in Ostend. In this painting, two women, modelled by the artist’s sister and
aunt, Maria Ludovica ‘Mimi’ Haegheman, sit at a cloth-covered table each attending to
their own solitary activity. The woman on the left, apparently occupied with private
thoughts and her sewing, looks down while the other woman appears to be reading.
Their lack of conversation, off-centered placement and closed, self-contained poses pre-
clude any social exchange and none is offered. As they sit in meditative quiet, a stream
of intense sunlight entering from windows on the right immerses the parlour and its pos-
sessions in a warm palette of yellow, browns and greens offset by cool blue highlights and
shadows, conveying in colour and light the sensation and signifiers of bourgeois comfort
and refinement.
Initially the women seem almost anecdotal, that is as posed, narrative elements that
compliment and give scale to this deep interior space.4 At the same time, the women’s
inner-directed poses and lack of interaction offer up another narrative, one that looks
at the interior from the perspective and solitary circumstance of women of this class.
They might be busy at their Sunday tasks,5 but as portrayed by Ensor, the women in
The Bourgeois Salon dwell in a quiet, reflective intimacy, their private acts of reading
226 S. M. CANNING

Figure 2. James Ensor, The Bourgeois Salon, (1881, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) photo:
© www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

and sewing blending in with the light-filled setting of the interior, their submersion the
embodiment of the leisure and privacy central to bourgeois life. Observation gives way
to emotive ambiance as Ensor evokes not just the interior’s tactile materiality but also
its aura of intimacy and privacy amid the quiet pursuits and enjoyments of domesticity.
Other paintings in this series construct the interior as a space of sociability permeated
with middle class propriety. After Dinner in Ostend (later re-titled Afternoon in Ostend)
(Figure 3) gazes into the same room as The Bourgeois Salon only now Ensor presents a
staged, more theatrical view of the family salon with two women seated at a centrally posi-
tioned table participating in the social ritual of afternoon tea. On the left, Mitche, wearing a
yellow dress, gloves and a hat tied with a big yellow bow, catches the viewer’s eye as she looks
up expectantly while perched on the edge of her chair. Mitche’s formal attire, outgoing
expression and pose proposes that her role in this enactment is that of the visitor possibly
waiting for another guest to arrive. At the right, the hostess, modelled by Ensor’s mother,
Marie Catharina Haegheman, sits back in her chair, cup and saucer in hand. Although
she is drinking her tea, her face is cast in shadow as she turns her head away, an unwilling
participant whose presence at this event is due perhaps to the artist’s need for a model.
Muted yet rich colour harmonies envelop everything in this interior – Mitche in her fashion-
able yellow dress, the tea cups with their chinoiserie detail, the vases, furniture and other dec-
orative elements – in a sensuous materiality. Yet, despite Ensor’s deft evocation of the
 DIX-NEUF 227

Figure 3. James Ensor, After Dinner in Ostend (later re-titled Afternoon in Ostend) (1881, Antwerp: Royal
Museum of Fine Arts) © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

parlour’s ambiance and its setting with the table and shared tea, a vast distance separates the
women, their lack of interaction imparting an awkward artificiality to the scene, undercut-
ting any conviviality this social ritual might have portended. Ensor’s disquieting and tense
depiction disrupts the salon’s decorum and mood, adding a more nuanced perspective
informed by the gendered, class dynamic of his own petit bourgeois experience. For
Ensor, the image and narratives of Afternoon in Ostend are important enough that when
the painting is rejected by the jury for the 1884 Belgian Salon, he sends it to Les XX the fol-
lowing year with this official refusal proudly noted in the catalogue.6
Adding to the complexity of Ensor’s evocative yet dissonant representation of the salon
interior, Afternoon in Ostend and Bourgeois Salon also contain veiled references to the
artist’s unsettled domestic life and petit bourgeois status. Painted only a few years after
the family’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1875 and the public sale of their household
items, these interiors describe the parlour and public rooms of a house that the Ensor
family rented, not owned. After the bankruptcy, all financial matters were put in the
Haegheman family name, with Ensor’s Aunt Mimi in charge of the family finances.7
Many of the fine furnishings depicted in these paintings are borrowed or leased with
the furniture provided by Aunt Mimi and the building’s owner, Mr. Rosen. Despite the
family’s tenuous economic and social status, Ensor’s paintings of the salon sustain the
appearance of stylish bourgeois propriety. Patriarchal privilege, central to middle class
values, is also absent in Ensor’s depictions of the salon as indicated by the empty chair
near the window in the background of both paintings, the same one occupied by
Ensor’s father James Frederick in a portrait painted that year.8 Made at a time when in
Belgium the image of the woman in the home was seen as both a manifestation of the hus-
band’s social status and success and the embodiment of bourgeois ideals for the lower
classes,9 Ensor paintings, based in his own circumstance, invite the public to view the
bourgeois salon as a place where women’s daily experiences prevail and have value.
228 S. M. CANNING

Chez Miss (At Mademoiselle’s) (1881, Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts), renamed
Russian Music in 1886,10 gazes into a different salon interior, quite possibly the parlour
of the Brussels home of his friends and patrons, Ernest and Mariette Rousseau,11 continuing
Ensor’s examination of the salon, now as a space for leisure delineated by the social etiquette
of nineteenth-century class and gender relations. A man, modelled by the artist Willy Finch,
dressed in the dark suit and high collar of a middle-class gentleman, and a woman, once
again the artist’s sister, Mitche,12 also wearing dark colours, are alone in the parlour. The
man, prominently placed in the middle ground where he sits in profile his top hat resting
on a nearby table, listens intently, his contemplative regard highlighted in warm light
while the woman plays the piano, her back turned to both her visitor and the viewer. Sur-
rounded by objects like vases, decorative vessels, mirrors and glass orbs that also display
Ensor’s ability to render a range of reflective surfaces, the woman remains an anonymous
producer of bourgeois taste, her act of playing the piano a sign of middle-class gentility,
refinement and education. In a period where contact between men and women is
bounded by the dictates of class and gender, the two figures, despite their close proximity,
maintain separate spheres, the identity and nature of their relationship hidden within the
decorum of the salon. Not unlike the paintings of Edouard Manet, the man and woman’s
inert poses and respectful distance lend the scene an enigmatic air, one that, rather than
description and anecdote, utilizes the immediacy and sensation of light and colour to
suggest the experience of listening and the private, intimate pleasure of the salon.
Although most likely based on a familiar occasion – musical evenings were a regular
occurrence at the Rousseau’s – the painting’s original title, Chez Miss, feminizes the
space, casting the man as the visitor to this interior. Nevertheless, he plays a central
role in the narrative, his reserved demeanour and thoughtful pose of engaged listening
set against the woman’s more active yet secondary role as entertainer, hostess and possible
muse. With the model’s actual identities and relationship known only to the artist, the
pair’s respectful distance and lack of interaction combines with the woman’s role as per-
former and the room’s tasteful trappings to offer an unexpectedly sympathetic yet objec-
tively distanced view of the propriety and refinement of modern bourgeois life.
Other interior views Ensor makes at this time move from the bourgeois salon to other
rooms, both public and private, within the Ensor family home. In the paintings The
Somber Lady (1881, Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts), Waiting (1882, Antwerp:
Royal Museum of Fine Arts), The Lady in Distress (1882, Paris: Musée d’Orsay) and
The Oyster Eater (Figure 4), properly dressed petit bourgeois women, modelled by
Mitche, sit, wait, rest or eat.13 Some of these women gaze out beyond these enclosed
rooms, and even if fashionably dressed, are often represented as reserved with introverted,
withdrawn poses, a notation perhaps of their busy and social yet restricted lives. Equally
apparent in these depictions of women in less represented domestic spaces, is the interior’s
appeal as a place where intimacy and invention freely comingle.
The allure of the interior and its pleasures for Ensor are particularly apparent in The
Oyster Eater where a young woman is depicted in the act of eating an oyster. At the
centre, a large table fills the interior space, its white tablecloth serving as the ground for
a sumptuous display of china, glassware, bottles of wine and a bouquet of flowers. A mir-
rored sideboard against the back wall repeats the rectangular format of the painting, effec-
tively framing the woman within this dining room interior. A rich palette of reds and
yellows creates a sunny atmosphere that surrounds and highlights the woman as well as
 DIX-NEUF 229

Figure 4. James Ensor, The Oyster Eater, (1882, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) © www.lukasweb.be –
Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

the many reflective, opaque, and transparent objects on the table, inviting an appraisal of
not only Ensor’s technique and facility but also the material plenitude of middle-class life.
Confined within this room – Mitche’s bib-covered body appears to be wedged between the
table and the sideboard – the woman’s relationship to her surroundings is agreeable, even
sympathetic. Immersed in warm sunlight and seated at a table full of flowers, food and
drink, taking no notice of her dining companion or our regard, the woman remains
engrossed in her appetizing meal, her act of consumption a demonstration of the indul-
gences of domestic life. The Oyster Eater’s scale (it is the largest of these early interiors)
underscores its importance as a subject for Ensor as do his many efforts to exhibit it
and have it included in a museum collection.14
While Ensor’s paintings of interiors, particularly those of the bourgeois salon, present
the propriety and public meaning of the home, his drawings, more private and direct,
become the primary arena for direct contemplation of modern experience and the com-
plicated and at times vexed relationship between observed reality and the artist’s more
subjective exploration. Done mainly in small sketchbooks that Ensor appears to have
always at hand, many of these pencil or ink pen drawings describe in careful detail the
230 S. M. CANNING

familiar surroundings and accessories of the family home: the hearth with its mantelpiece,
mirror, clock and chinoiserie vases, lamps and candlesticks, ornate carved armoires and
cabinets; the studio with its chairs, stove, lamp and easel. Beginning in the mid-1880s
Ensor reworks a number of these drawings, adding faces, masks, grotesques and
shadowy figures to earlier more realistic renderings.15 Some of these additions are inspired
by his copies after Honoré Daumier’s caricatures and Jacques Callot’s Grotesque Dwarfs,
others by Odilon Redon’s evocative drawings and lithographs and Edgar Allan Poe’s
stories.16 At times Ensor revises drawings observed from life: quick studies of heads
seen from odd angles or faces with distorted expressions along with sketches of masks
from the family shop. Overlaid with other images to create odd juxtapositions and
amusing and absurd riffs, these drawings give free reign to Ensor’s imagination and
delight in invention and free association. Fantasy and grotesque figures invade the bour-
geois interior disturbing the contemplation of objects and furnishings. Bizarre, distorted
figures gather as if family around the fireplace (Fireplace Utilities and Masks) (Figure
5),17 appear beneath a lamp (Corner of a Table) (Figure 6) or as apparitions beside
drapery (Nude with Curtain, Dusseldorf: Graphishe Sammlung). Detailed drawings of
salon accessories evolve into nudes and masked figures (Bronze Pot with Apparitions)
(Figure 7), breasts morph into grinning faces (Nude with Balustrade, Dusseldorf:

Figure 5. James Ensor, Fireplace Utilities and Masks, (c. 1880–86 Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts)
© www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.
 DIX-NEUF 231

Figure 6. James Ensor, Corner of a Table, (1880/83 and 1885/86, Chicago: The Art Institute). Gift of
Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection © 2019 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels, Belgium.

Figure 7. James Ensor, Bronze Pot with Apparitions, (1880-85, Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts) photo:
© www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.
232 S. M. CANNING

Kunstmuseum). Multiple drawings, overlaid and collaged together, create strange, inven-
tive juxtapositions in works like Hippogriff, Evil Spirits, Interior Elements (Figure 8) where
a drawing of a mantle and clock, vases and masks gives way to fantasy and pictorial logic
dissolves into an imaginary space.18 Whether simple line drawings in pencil or ink or
experimental multimedia images created with gouache, coloured pencil, watercolor and
chalk, these works join the materiality of everyday experience with the disruptive and pro-
vocative potential of invention and personal fantasy.
In some drawings, Ensor includes his own self-portrait peering out from mirrors, cabi-
nets, curtains and dark, lamp lit rooms (Self-Portrait (‘Pas Fini’) (Figure 9); The Upright
Piano, (1880–83 and 1885–88, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) (Figure 10))
making visible an identity imagined as an amalgamation of the familiar and familial, part
of and an extension of this bourgeois milieu. Immediate and experiential, these self-portraits
affirm Ensor’s personal identification with these interior spaces, his visible, performative
presence forming 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. At other
times, Ensor’s insistent and provocative presence disrupts the stultifying routine of the bour-
geois salon and the mundane values contained there. In Haunted Chimney (1888, Brussels:
private collection) Ensor’s own face, added to an earlier drawing of the artist’s sister and
mother in front of the mantelpiece, stares out from the mirror. As the women go about
their daily routine, seemingly unaware of his spectral presence behind the vases and
clock, Ensor’s unvarying regard appends a note of emphatic dissidence to the scene.

Figure 8. James Ensor, Hippogriff, Evil Spirits, Interior Elements, (1880-83, Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts)
photo: © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.
 DIX-NEUF 233

Figure 9. James Ensor, Self-Portrait, (‘Pas Fini’) (1885, Ostend: MuZee) photo: © www.lukasweb.be – Art
in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

As these drawings suggest, Ensor’s bodily presence in these interiors makes visible an
acute self-consciousness, one that is immersed in both the interior and the everyday
world outside the frame, articulating the artist’s identification with and difference from
his contemporary milieu and his steadfast belief in the expressive potential of his own sub-
jective vision. Disembodied, at times fragmentary, isolated and yet intimately interconnected
with his surroundings, Ensor’s self-portraits within these interiors describe and give form to
the social space of contemporary experience as both observed and imagined. By the second
half of the nineteenth century, the realization that this personal space of ‘interiority’ could be
just as real and visible as the observable exterior world of everyday life had begun to take
hold of bourgeois imagination.19 Underscoring this turn toward subjectivity and new under-
standing of the self, many artists began to investigate through what Susan Sidlauskas has
termed ‘expressive interiors’ the psychological and pictorial tensions that rose from this
modern exchange between public and private, body and place.20
While the bourgeois salon serves as the setting for Ensor’s initial exploration of the
ambience and the narratives and frictions underlying contemporary social experience
and his drawings consider the inventive and expressive possibilities of his imaginative
inner life, other works dating from this same period focus more directly on the emotive
and expressive potential of the interior, now imagined as a drama taking place in the
studio. Blending realist description with satiric exaggeration, Scandalized Masks, both a
drawing (Figure 11) and painting (1883 Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) present
234 S. M. CANNING

Figure 10. James Ensor, The Upright Piano, (1880-83 and 1885-88, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts)
photo: © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

an interior scene at a moment of conflict and implied violence. Devoid of decoration

except for a hanging oil lantern and table with a half-empty bottle on it, this interior
suggests a more public space, perhaps a tavern, but is more than likely composed in the
artist’s studio. As with the salon interiors, a table once again becomes the site of a
social exchange now between two obviously lower-class types, a man and a woman
dressed in plain clothing. Any personal association is veiled as both figures appear to be
wearing masks, but the woman who enters through a door at the right could just as
easily be an old woman with a large nose and chin.21 The drawing’s sparse setting,
strong light and cast shadows along with the provocative placement of the masked
figures furthers the theatricality and artifice of this clearly confrontational yet farcical
encounter. Unlike Ensor’s salon paintings that invite the viewer to experience and identify
with a tasteful and sensuous evocation of bourgeois life, Scandalized Masks, rather than a
representation of a real event, presents instead a dramatically staged moment of travesty
and masking, a performance whose psycho-social narrative of alienation, alcoholism and
hostility is aimed at shocking or at least ‘scandalizing’ middle class propriety.
The theatricality on display in Scandalized Masks is already apparent in Ensor’s sketch-
books where he made many drawings of actors and illustrations of performances. Similarly,
the settings for Ensor’s bourgeois salon paintings resemble the sceneries found in contempor-
ary boulevard theatre. Ensor’s interest in theatre, performance and spectacle was encouraged
no doubt by his friendship with Théo Hannon, Mariette Rousseau-Hannon’s brother, who in
addition to painting and writing poetry and criticism also wrote plays and satirical revues for
 DIX-NEUF 235

Figure 11. James Ensor, Scandalized Masks, (1883, Chicago: The Art Institute) partial and promised gift
of Celia and David Hilliard © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels, Belgium.

the cabaret stage.22 Like other contemporaries, Ensor regularly attended a range of theatrical
productions from circuses to puppet shows and even a Wagner opera.23 By the mid-1880s
theatrical references begin to filter into his work including box-like compositions that
resemble a proscenium stage sometimes with wings and scrims, dramatic lighting and
increasingly the use of costumes, props, masks and figures resembling puppets or
mannequins.
The theatricality and expressive possibilities of the studio interior as a space for per-
formance and invention already apparent in Scandalized Masks becomes more evident
in Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries (Figure 12). In this painting Ensor revisits an earlier
painting of a figure, possibly Mitche, seated in profile in the attic studio space reading a
book. Reworking the painting and adding more details, Ensor transforms the interior
into a bright and colourful space decorated with Japanese prints and decorative scrolls
where a skeleton holding an unfolding print or scroll of colourful cloth now sits. Reveling
in the colour, light and arabesque of this richly ornamented interior, Ensor presents the
studio as a place where observation gives way to personal fantasy and invention.
Ensor’s image of a skeletal figure enjoying the pleasures of the interior and interiority
finds parallels in Baudelaire’s concept of dédoublement, or ‘making double’ where the crea-
tive artist as both a detached observer of objective reality and an engaged subjectivity dis-
covers a play of associations that is both evocative and expressive of the ambivalent and
complex nature of modern experience.24 As Suzanne Singletary has pointed out, the
interior and in particular, the enclosed and intimate rooms of the home became, for
236 S. M. CANNING

Figure 12. James Ensor, Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries, (1885/1888 Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts)
photo: © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

Baudelaire and his contemporaries, a space for creative invention and emphatic identifi-
cation, contemplation and the inner journey of the imagination.25
At the same time that Ensor is exploring a more imaginative approach in his paintings
and drawings, he comes in contact with the nascent Symbolist movement of writers and
artists who reject naturalism to focus instead on suggestion, chance and formal distortion
in order to make visible an inner, contemplative world and reveal the hidden correspon-
dences among things. In 1886, even as Ensor begins his experiments with the expressive
potential of the interior through additions of grotesque and invented elements to his paint-
ings and drawings, the Belgian critic, lawyer and playwright Edmond Picard is proposing a
new theatrical model – the monodrama – as an alternative, more Symbolist method, one
that accents performance and the use of evocative words and gestures, suggestion, and the
imagination over description and narrative continuity.26 The Belgian playwright Maurice
Maeterlinck similarly accentuates the performative and evocative process a few years later
in his manifesto for Symbolist theatre, even calling on the actor to perform like a puppet so
that stylized movements and limited voice and gesture would highlight the indirect, sug-
gestive ideal, dream and mystery of the text.27 The poet and critic Emile Verhaeren also
encouraged Ensor to couple Symbolist aesthetics with current social and political issues
and to see the public and social potential of theatricality and expressive deformation.
Replacing the salon as the place to engage the expressive possibilities of the interior, the
studio now becomes a place where Ensor can perform his subjective and often contrary
perspective on contemporary life. Skeleton Regarding Chinoiseries, Astonishment of the
 DIX-NEUF 237

Figure 13. James Ensor, Astonishment of the Mask Wouse, (1887-1889, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine
Arts) photo: © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders vzw. © 2019 SABAM, Belgium.

Mask Wouse (1887–1889, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) (Figure 13) and Skeletons
Warming Themselves (1889 Fort Worth, Texas: Kimbell Art Museum) both take place in
the box-like space of his studio-theatre with a horizontal raked floor serving as the stage
for a cast of characters to pose and act out while other figures and masks await in the
wings. Astonishment of the Mask Wouse’s narrative of artifice and allegory unfolds
before its audience as a fashionably dressed middle class matron promenades across the
stage, her accessorized display – a bonnet, umbrella, gloves and shawl – countered by
her mask-like face, tiny hands and a rather transparent costume that imbues the figure
with an ethereal presence even as it reveals her to be a puppet-like construction of
Ensor’s imagination. Nearby lies a pile of what looks like discarded costumes and props
from a performance: masks and skulls, several jackets, a boot, top hat and wine bottle,
as well as a horn, violin, doll and fan. Strewn about, these cast-off items of bourgeois
life, like the skeleton holding a candle in the foreground, bestows an aspect of vanitas
reflection and ironic absurdity on the whole scene. Defying description and even corpore-
ality, this strange figure with her gloves, hat and umbrella reaffirms, as do the masks, cos-
tumes and skulls piled up on the floor, that we are witness to a scene of pure invention in
which theatrically arranged elements of transgression, farce, artifice and carnival travesty
present a parodic performance of bourgeois propriety.
In Skeletons Warming Themselves, a studio interior saturated in sensuous jewel-like
colour serves as the strange and evocative setting for the artist’s disruptive, and morosely
funny imaginary drama. Like Mask Wouse, the characters have skull heads and puppet-
like bodies. The two figures at the centre pose around the studio stove, one wearing a
top hat and the other a shawl, their apparel signalling their role as a ‘bourgeois couple’.
As a skeletal head looks in from the side and other skulls lie scattered about, another skel-
eton figure wearing a pink dress enters from the background near a hanging scrim. Below
the stove an intriguing arrangement of objects that include a skull, yellow jacket or smock
238 S. M. CANNING

and boots suggests a resting body, that, when combined with the nearby palette, brushes
and violin, alludes to the creative life.28 Words written on the stove, ‘Pas de feu’ (The fire is
out’) and ‘En trouverez vous demain?’ (‘Will you find any tomorrow’), introduces a rather
poignant, yet ultimately absurd scenario as long dead skeletons can never keep warm even
if huddled near a stove. Joined together in the cool light of the studio, this incongruous
assortment of skeletal puppets and props promotes fantasy and suggestion over realist nar-
rative, conjuring through Symbolist evocation Ensor’s subjective exploration of the chal-
lenges and transience of an artist’s life.
By the 1890s, stage-like interiors with raked floors, wings, scrims and backcloths,
puppet-like figures with heads made from skulls and masks and bodies fashioned out of
fabric or clothing and assemblages of objects related to the studio or the salon have
become commonplace in Ensor’s work. In paintings such as The Assassination (1890,
Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art) and Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man
(1891, Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) provocative arrangements of figures and
props examine, as had his earlier bourgeois salons, the social and psychological narratives
circulating in the interior. In other works such as The Frightful Musicians (1891, Brussels:
private collection) and The Strange Masks (1892, Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Art) the
studio becomes the space of burlesque performance while the staged scenes of The Wise
Judges (1891, Belgium: private collection), The Bad Doctors, (1892, Brussels: Université
Libre) and Dangerous Cooks (1896, New York: private collection) deploy parody, exagger-
ation and distortion to satirize and comment on social values, lawyers, medical practice
and the contemporary art world.
Immersing his audience in phantasmagoria of the interior Ensor joined subjectivity and
imagination with posing and performance to enact his personal view of modern experi-
ence, a staged representation whose combination of free association and evocation
recalls August Strindberg’s directive for Intimate Theatre:
seek the intimate in form, a restricted subject treated in depth, few
characters, large points of view, free imagination, but based on
observation, experience, carefully studied; simple, but not too simple;
no great apparatus, no superfluous minor roles, no regular five-acters [sic],
no long drawn-out evenings.29

Like Strindberg and the Symbolists, Ensor sought through his representation of the
interior to make visible the personal, social and symbolic meaning hidden within the
mundane circumstance of the everyday. Moving between the interiors of the studio and
salon, from realist depictions of bourgeois life, leisure and pleasure to scenes of arranged
artifice, Ensor fashions his own intimate theatre, a place of subjectivity, intimacy and per-
formance where interiority and imagination is given free play and the critical, expressive,
and social narratives of modern experience are revealed.

Notes
1. This garment was worn exclusively in private and only in the company of family and friends.
As such the ‘robe d’intérieur’ retained some of the intimate qualities associated with under-
wear and with free and easy living. See Schirrmeister (1990, 110–11).
2. Ensor exhibited this painting under the title of ‘Seule’ at the 1882 Paris Salon (no.981) and the
1881 La Chrysalide exhibition. At the first Les XX salon held in Brussels in 1884, he showed it
 DIX-NEUF 239

as Une coloriste (no. 3). He continued to use this title at subsequent exhibitions including the
1887 exhibition of the Antwerp-based group L’Art Indépendent (no. 39).
3. While paintings of women in interiors had become a popular subject by the later nineteenth
century their appearance in these works was often that of a decorative commodity on display.
Ensor’s contemporary Alfred Stevens (1823-1906) provides an apt example of this approach,
his paintings typically offering detailed, often virtuoso representations of fashionably dressed
upper class women within tastefully appointed bourgeois salons. Impressionist painters por-
trayed the private sphere of the home as a place of relaxation and pleasure where women
engaged in appropriate activities for their gender and social status such as resting on the
sofa or playing the piano. More often when depicting the home, male Impressionist painters
focused on the actions and social interaction of men in the more public spaces of the home
like the library or salon. For Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894)
however, the interior provided the setting for their exploration of the familial, domestic ten-
sions of modern relationships. Scenes of women socializing with other women in their homes
were mainly represented in work of Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) and Berthe Morisot (1841-
1895) with female relatives or friends serving as models. Like Ensor, Cassatt and Morisot
directed the viewer’s attention to personal moments and the intimacy of the interior display-
ing for public consumption the significance of the reflective and psychological aspects of lived
experience in the private spaces of the home. Ensor’s engagement and identification with the
domestic interior as an evocative, intimate, and feminine space would be continued by Sym-
bolist-oriented painters like Édouard Vuillard (1869-1940).
4. Interestingly, Ensor’s 1880 study (Antwerp, p.c.) for this painting offers a quite different per-
spective as a standing woman (Mitche) now dominates the foreground, forcing the spectator
to look around her in order to peer into the room.
5. Ensor’s sister, mother, and aunt spent most days in the shop with Sunday the only day off.
The women in the family were often quite busy with the family business. His mother and
aunt did most of the ordering for the store and Aunt Mimi also ran another family souvenir
shop in Blankenberge.
6. Quite possibly the title and Ensor’s tachist approach were the reasons the painting was
rejected from the Brussels Salon. As Marnin Young (2015, 183) has suggested, the original
title could have been a homage to Courbet’s After dinner in Ornans that he had seen in
Lille in 1884: ‘Courbet left me astounded: His After-Dinner at Ornans is a masterpiece, it
equals Rembrandt.’ (‘Courbet m’a stupéfié. Son Après-dinée à Ornans est une chef-d’oeuvre.
Sans exagérer, cela vaut Rembrandt.’) (Letter Ensor to Dario de Regoyos, December 1884)
(Ensor 1999, 154) but that Ensor later changed it to Afternoon in Ostend to evade the associ-
ation too obviously suggested by the title. Even if Ensor had not seen this Courbet painting
when he first titled his painting in 1881, he knew of Courbet and especially his palette knife
technique through discussions with the Belgian painter Guillaume Vogels and more than
likely intended for the Belgian public to associate his painting with Realism and the
French artist’s work.
7. As reported in L’Echo d’Ostende, 7 November, 1875. On the bankruptcy see Patrick Flori-
zoone, (1996, 27–29). Although Aunt Mimi was responsible for all aspects of the souvenir
shops in both Ostend and Blankenberge and along with Ensor’s mother, ran the shops,
kept the inventory and regularly travelled to and stayed in Brussels on business, neither
women were considered the owners. After the bankruptcy took the ownership away from
Ensor’s father, Jean Louis Haegheman and his eldest son Léopold were the proprietors
assisted by their wives Marie Antoinette Hauwaert and Pauline deWinter. Under the
Belgian Civil Code the husband was often listed as the owner or the one who directs the
business, while the wife, even if she took care of the business, was termed as an ‘assistant’
and not even listed in the statistics or the tax rolls. Many of these businesses were also run
by single women, widows, or those separated or divorced, but again these enterprises were
viewed as supplementary income. Belgian women in fact remained nearly invisible or
under-represented in trade statistics and tax rolls, an aspect which would affect their social
position, the family economy and access to voting rights.
240 S. M. CANNING

8. Ensor exhibited this portrait of his father (1881, Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) as Le
Liseur (The Reader) at the 1886 Les XX salon (no.14) and in Antwerp at the 1887 L’Art Indé-
pendant salon (no. 37).
9. As Eliane Gubin (1991) has shown, government inquiries in the 1880’s on working con-
ditions in Belgium concluded that women’s labor was responsible for the violent social
unrest and degradation of the family because work made women deviate from their roles
as mothers and wives. Reforms that sought to remove women from factories and mines
and train them for domestic work were justified as improving the conditions of the
working poor, but the model of the woman at work in the home, established by social refor-
mers who set up schools to train working class women in cooking, sewing and maintaining
the home, also served to educate the lower classes on Catholic religious belief and bourgeois
family life.
10. Ensor showed Chez Miss at the 1881 Brussels Salon, the 1882 Paris Salon, and the1883 Ghent
Salon to generally positive reviews. When he exhibited this painting at the 1886 Les XX salon
Ensor changed the name to Russian Music, a title, that as Henry Bounameaux (1992-93, 139)
suggests might have been intended to associate the painting with the music of Russian com-
posers who had recently given concerts in Brussels, including at Les XX and discussed in the
avant-garde journal L’Art moderne (‘Le premier concert populaire: Musique russe’, 17
January 1886, 19). The new title also made pointed reference to a contemporary painting
by Ensor’s fellow vingtist Fernand Khnopff entitled Listening to Schumann (1883, Brussels:
Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium) that Ensor thought was plagiarized from his
earlier painting.
11. Ernest Rousseau (1831-1908) studied at the Free University of Brussels, graduating in 1853.
That same year he was appointed professor at the Military School where he taught for thirty
years until 1883. Beginning in 1856, he also taught geometry and physics at the Free Univer-
sity where in 1858 he was elected Chair of Mathematical Physics and in 1873 he taught indus-
trial physics at the Polytechnical School. Rousseau was elected Rector at the Free University
in 1884, a post he held until 1886. Specialized in physics and geometry, Rousseau’s research
focused on the practical applications of science. He designed a number of 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 Pairs Universal
Exhibition of 1889. His wife, Mariette Rousseau-Hannon (1850-1926) was also a scientist, a
botanist specializing in the study of mushrooms. As other women of this period, Mariette
could not enroll at the Free University and was instead given private lessons by her father
Joseph-Désiré Hannon and later Ernest Rousseau. Mariette’s interest in botany was
further stimulated through her friendship with another professor at the Free University,
Jean-Édouard Bommer (1866-1038) and his wife Élise-Caroline Destrée-Bommer (1832-
1910). These two women continued their research in the new field of mycology and later pub-
lishing their research in several books. For a recent discussion of their collaboration and con-
tribution to mycology see Mary S. Chase (2004, 104–05).
12. The model could also possibly be Mariette Rousseau-Hannon. A drawing entitled L’Air de
Madelon in a sketchbook owned by Mariette Rousseau-Hannon (Notebook of Drawings,
Brussels: Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 10290) depicts a musical evening prob-
ably at the Rousseau’s where Mariette dressed in a dark dress her hair pulled back in a bun is
seated at the far left playing the piano. But as letters and a number of Ensor’s sketches suggest,
Mitche was also a frequent guest at the Rousseau’s where this scene is most likely set. Ensor
mentions in his letters to Rousseau Mitche’s improving skills playing contemporary music,
including Wagner.
13. Ensor painted numerous representations of women in interior settings. Some, like Lady with
a Fan, 1880 (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) and The Convalescent, 1880–81 (Itami:
Itami City Museum of Art) are most likely painted in the artist’s studio with his sister serving
as the model. His painting, Woman with Blue Shawl 1881 (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine
Arts) depicts the artist’s grandmother Maria Hortensia Haegheman seated in a chair near the
 DIX-NEUF 241

fireplace, the same place he would paint a portrait of his father that same year (see n.8). His
painting, The Lady in Grey, 1881 (Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Arts) portrays Mme. Félix
Buelens, wife of the Ostend painter, seated knitting quite possibly in the salon of her home.
Unlike Ensor’s paintings of the salon, these paintings, while set in interiors, are less studies of
bourgeois life than portraits of women.
14. Refused by both the Antwerp Salon (no. 500, where it was titled ‘In the Land of Colors’) and
L’Essor in 1882, Ensor exhibited this painting at Les XX in 1886 (no. 3). After its first exhibi-
tion at Les XX, Ensor continued to show this painting publically. He tried unsuccessfully to
place this painting in a museum collection. Emma and Albin Lambotte purchased The Oyster
Eater from Ensor’s studio and in 1927 Emma Lambotte-Protin donated it to the Royal
Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp.
15. For a discussion of Ensor’s additions of these elements see Marcel De Maeyer, 1963.
16. Ensor was introduced to Callot’s work through Marius Vachon’s 1886 study of the artist
(Paris: Librairie de l’art), a gift of Mariette Rousseau-Hannon. Ensor copied Callot’s
dwarfs into a sketchbook (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, 2711/131 and 2711/13)
and drew upon other works of Callot for his 1887 etching The Pisser and painting Tribu-
lations of Saint Anthony (1887, New York: MoMA).
Ensor first encountered Odilon Redon’s work at the 1886 Les XX Salon, including an 1883
drawing, Le Masque de la Mort Rouge (Masque of the Red Death) (no. 5) and lithographs
inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s writings owned by Jules Destrée (no. 10 a.-d.). Redon may
have encouraged Ensor to explore the American author’s work, but Ensor no doubt was
already familiar with Poe, probably through Charles Baudelaire’s translation Histoires extra-
ordinaires (1856) and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (1857).
17. As the Antwerp drawing, a number of these drawings focus on the fireplace: Fireplace and
Masks, c. 1880–86 and 1886–89 and Fireplace c. 1889-83, 1886-89, (both drawings: Ghent,
P.Florizoone-James Ensor Archief).
18. The possibilities of collage are also explored in The Flea 1880-83/1888 (Belgium, private col-
lection) and the extraordinary 51 sheet mixed media collage The Temptation of St. Anthony
(Chicago: The Art Institute, 1888) that utilized similar strategies to examine and critique his
contemporary milieu. On this work see Susan M. Canning (2014).
19. The term interiority or a ‘visceral sense of insideness’ was coined by Carolyn Steedman (1995,
4–5).
20. Sidlauskas (2000, x). On nineteenth century constructions of identity and subjectivity see
Michel Foucault (1988) and Charles Taylor’s (1989) discussion of the modern self. Also
related is Claude Cernuschi’s (2013) discussion of the self, social psychology and Realist
self-representation in relation to Gustave Courbet’s self-portraits.
21. Like their clothing, the pair’s social status and identity are vague. The flattened top hat is
more commonly worn by a middle class man. The object held by the woman resembles a
club but is in fact a musical instrument; perhaps a horn or wooden flute similar to one
Ensor had been known to play, leading some authors to identify the woman as Ensor’s
mother or grandmother. Ensor’s lack of specific detail and use of masks to obscure identity
has led some to associate this painting with the artist’s personal life. Diane Lesko (1985, 22–
23) links the two protagonists to the artist’ s father and grandmother, who as she notes, even
in old age continued to dress up in carnival costumes. Lesko also agrees with Lucien Schwob
who described the figure as an old shrew who prepares to chastise he husband, her features
‘hardened by miserliness’ that extends a mood of ‘irrational fear’ to the canvas. (Schwab and
Edebau 1963, 136).
22. When Ensor first met Théodore Hannon (1851-1916), in Brussels, he was already a well-con-
nected artist who had studied with Camille van Camp and was a founding member in 1875 of
the La Chrysalide art group. In addition to his painting practice, Hannon was also an art
critic, a printmaker and poet. He published the collection of poems for which he is most
known, Rimes de joie (Rhymes of Joy) in 1881, with a preface by J.K. Huysmans and a frontis-
piece and three prints by the Belgian artist Félicien Rops. In the mid-1880’s Hannon became
interested in parody and burlesque theater and soon achieved commercial success and
242 S. M. CANNING

popularity writing plays, pantomines, and burlesque and musical revues, often collaborating
with the Lynen brothers and the theater producer Luc Malpertuis.
23. Mariette Rousseau-Hannon saved an album of sketches and letters sent to her by Ensor that
included drawings of their excursions to the circus and vaudeville acts (Notebook of Drawings
Brussels: Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 10290) or : (Notebook of Drawings see
n.12). On several occasions, Ensor’s sister performed Wagner’s music at the Rousseau
home and in 1887 Ensor attended a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, at the Royal
Theater of the Mint in Brussels, inspiring a drawing, The Ride of the Valkyries (1886-88,
Belgium: private collection).
24. Charles Baudelaire, ‘De l’essence du rire’ (1852-57) in Œuvres completes, 2: 317 as translated
in Henri Dorra (1994, 7) On Baudelaire’s concept of dédoublement see Dorra (6-7).
25. Singletary (2008, 45). Singletary discusses Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘La Chambre double’ in
which the concept of dédoublement is explored in a room where ‘sentient furniture
imbued with “sonnambulistic life” shares the poet’s reverie and speaks to him in a “silent
language.” Through an emphatic fusion of subject and space, the rooms seem suspended
within a time-free zone of “clarity and the delicious vagueness of harmony”, a utopian uni-
verse accessible via imaginative interiority.’ (45). Other writers that Singletary cites who also
join the home with the concept of interiority include Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier,
Honoré de Balzac and Edmond de Goncourt, authors who Ensor had also read and, as Bau-
delaire, might have encouraged his fascination with the interior.
26. Picard developed these ideas in his 1887 play Le Juré (The Juror) a scene of judicial life in five
acts initially staged at Les XX on February 19, 1887, a performance that Ensor most likely
saw, with six original framed drawings by Odilon Redon (owned by Picard) on display.
For this presentation, Redon’s prints were placed at the beginning of each section or act, sep-
arated by a transparent leaf and a text suggested by Picard. On these drawings see Fred
Leeman (1994, 187–8). Picard’s essay on the monodrama, ‘Théâtre pour lecture à haute
voix’ was published in L’Art moderne on 12 December 1886. See also Paul Aron’s discussion
on Picard and his influence on Symbolist theater (1998, 178–91).
27. ‘Menus propos-le théâtre’, La Jeune Belgique (September, 1890, 331–6). For a discussion of
Symbolism and Ensor see also Susan Canning (2015).
28. The vacated recumbent figure could be a veiled reference Ensor himself. In 1879 he painted a
self-portrait in his studio holding a palette and wearing a similar yellow painter’s smock
(Belgium: private collection).
29. August Strindberg, Letter to August Paul from Stockholm, dated January 6, 1907 as quoted in
Egil Törnqvist and Birgitta Steene, 2007, 107.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their comments and also would like to thank
Gloria Groom of the Art Institute of Chicago and Herwig Todts of the Royal Museum of Fine
Arts Antwerp for their support and kind assistance with this essay.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Susan M. Canning received a PhD in History of Art from the Pennsylvania State University. Her
research, writing, criticism and curatorial activities focus on modern art with a special emphasis on
late nineteenth-century Belgian art, Symbolism, Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau. In addition
to James Ensor, Dr Canning has written on the art group Les XX, Fernand Khnopff and Henry van
 DIX-NEUF 243

de Velde. Her research has been published in numerous journals, exhibition catalogues and edited
volumes, and she has also served as a curator, consultant and co-organizer for museum exhibitions
on James Ensor in Ghent and Antwerp, Belgium, Chicago, Illinois and New York. Dr Canning is
currently completing a book-length study on the social context of James Ensor’s art practice.

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