“James Ensor. Inspired by Brussels” at the Royal Library

In Brussels, in the coming months you can admire some 75 paintings, etchings and also drawings by James Ensor at the Royal Library, the KBR. To stage the exhibition the Library has joined forces with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. After Ensor's still lifes at Mu.ZEE in Ostend, it is the second major exhibition in this Ensor Year, marking the 75th anniversary of his death.

Think of James Ensor and you think of Ostend, but Brussels too played an important part in the painter’s life insists Daan van Heesch, curator of the KBR's print room, who curated this exhibition together with Vanessa Braekeveld.

"Ensor is inextricably linked to Ostend, but it was in Brussels that he flourished as a person and as an artist. He studied here and returned year after year. It was here he made friendships for life. It is also here that he made his career and where he exhibited his first paintings depicting masks".

All these steps in Ensor's formative years in Brussels are covered in the exhibition. For instance you can see the stiff model drawings he had to make at the Brussels Academy, where he remained for three years. He was not bad at drawing, but as far as painting was concerned he dangled at the back of the class. At the age 20, he called it quits and started painting in a completely different novel, unpolished style like here in "The Lamp Boy".

Les XX (The Twenty)

"Ensor inspired by Brussels" leads you through all kinds of chic salons. The location is no coincidence, says Daan van Esch: "We are in the palace of Charles of Lorraine, which was repurposed into Belgium's first museum of modern art following Belgian independence. From 1887 - Ensor was then 27 - he would exhibit his most controversial works here together with the avant-garde art group Les XX. Right on this spot."

While viewing Ensor’s work you are literally walking in his footsteps.

James the beetle and Mariëtte the dragonfly

James Ensor also had a personal connection with Brussels, long after he said goodbye to the Academy. Together with his family, he would come to stay in Brussels for a while every year. He was also adopted by the Rousseau Family, who would buy his work. He often stayed with them, painted the interior of their house and became good friends with the lady of the house, Mariëtte Rousseau. She was a scientist, specialising in fungi and mushrooms.

"He certainly had a soft spot for her, as his letters and his works show. He would later declare that meeting Mariëtte was the most important encounter of his life," Van Heesch explains. In the amusing etching "Eccentric insects", Ensor depicts himself as a beetle and Mariëtte as a dragonfly.

Mariëtte Rousseau pasted Ensor's many letters, which he lavishly illustrated, into an album. You can view one page at the expo; the others are in urgent need of restoration, for which KBR is launching a crowdfunding campaign.

Drawings by Ensor are rarely shown. "Works on paper are very fragile and sensitive to light. We can only exhibit them for three months. You won't see them again soon," van Heesch notes.

By the way, the Royal Library was early in recognising Ensor's talent. When the artist was 32, the KBR bought 25 of his etchings. The oldest public Ensor collection has been expanded considerably since then. A fine selection of these works is now on display, along with well-known paintings from the Royal Museums, such as "The Vexed Masks" or "The Bad Doctors".

Brussels continued to inspire Ensor. "Here he came into contact with international artists, writers and scientists. Brussels was the breeding ground for his art in his early years," Van Heesch says. He saw people demonstrating under his window frame, and those crowds also found their way into his etchings and paintings, such as "Christ’s Entry into Brussels", the great work that hangs in Los Angeles.

"Ensor poked fun at the establishment. He translated the demands of the people, e.g. the call for universal suffrage, into his works". As in the drawing "Belgium in the 19th century", where King Leopold II disdainfully looks down on protesters and asks "What do you want? Aren't you satisfied"?