James Ensor - The Skeleton Painter

Like many of James Ensor’s paintings featuring skulls or skeletons, this one is an odd combination of the macabre and the joyful. The palette is bright, fresh, and the room depicted seems enticingly sunny. But the artist is represented as dead (or at least a zombie-like member of the living dead) and skulls other than his own are also strewn around the room. One sits on the floor at bottom left in profile, with what looks like a puncture mark or bullet hole visible on it. Another is perched top left above a cloth-covered canvas while yet another is impaled on the easel, as if in imitation of the medieval practice of displaying the heads of traitors and criminals on pikes after a public execution.

James Ensor, The Skeleton Painter (1896), oil on canvas, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

The skulls function most obviously as momento mori, reminders that our time on earth is short, that in the midst of life we are in death. But they also indicate sensitivity – the artist here is not just thin-skinned; his skin is absent, flayed from his bones. They anticipate T.S. Eliot’s Whispers of Immortality in which the poet admires the dramatist John Webster for the way in which he ‘saw the skull beneath the skin’. However, the eyeballs in each skull in this painting remain alive, signalling that the skeleton here is not just deployed as in an immature medical student’s stunt but the existence of a pained and enduring intelligence.

The artist, the painting suggests, is forever exposing himself to ridicule and outright hostility, but perseveres even at the cost of his life and soul and the tortures both must perforce endure. Any vanity or worldliness in such a scene is thereby rendered trivial, meaningless and above all blackly comic in the face of the inescapable reality of death. On the other hand, Ensor seems to be saying, you might as well take delight in colour and light while you can. Working in the fin de siècle period as a new century loomed, the artist became preoccupied with endings, decay and the inconstancy of time itself, all themes that surfaced through this period of profound social, political, economic, technological and artistic upheaval.

The skull theme is reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age Vanitas works where artists such as Harmen Steenwijck, among many other practitioners of the genre, would include them in their still life paintings depicting worldly objects; those articles that fostered conceit in man and distracted him from the necessary humility before God and from the certainty of death.

Harmen Steenwijck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, c. 1640, oil on oak panel, National Gallery, London

Resuscitated skeletons also recall the much earlier medieval depictions of the dance macabre, the final processional dance towards the grave, a motif which, as with the watching of horror movies today, is a strange combination of the cathartically terrifying, the silly and the malevolent. Such phantasmagorical images became commonplace throughout northern Europe and were assimilated to become part of the culture. Artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger showed them in woodcuts which were collected and circulated into book form in 1526 while the German master Bernt Notke made an enormous tapestry of the subject for St Mary’s church in Lübeck (lost to WWII bombing) and another for St Nicholas’s church in Tallinn in the mid fifteenth-century.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel

Much later, Saint-Saëns composed a symphonic poem on the subject, first performed in 1875. It is based on the appearance of Death every Halloween and of course Toussaint or All Saints Day (Nov 1^st) and All Souls Day (Nov 2^nd) are occasions on which the dead are still commemorated by churchgoers today.

I think that Ensor, although atheistic in outlook, was profoundly acculturated to these religious leitmotifs. Deployed in his paintings they act as a mordantly satirical commentary on his place in the artistic world and show him to be simultaneously bridling against the criticism of others who would metaphorically eviscerate him (even Les XX, the Avant Garde group of artists that he co-founded in 1883 went on to reject his mesiterwerk Christ's Entry into Brussels ) while laughing at himself and his essentially absurd vanity.

The Skeleton Painter is like the antithesis of a self-portrait in that any identifying facial features are absent; one skeleton is much like any other when denuded of flesh. The painter has thus become a grotesque and uncanny version of himself, a characterless, ghoulish and isolated outsider figure who is foolishly animated: he is condemned to enact artmaking endlessly and futilely, despite his raw-boned undead condition.

In the painting, the walls of the studio are bedecked with art, and he holds a brush in his right hand with another pair in his breast pocket, ready to dip into the palette held in his left hand, seemingly intent on making ever more pictures. Like in the Ostend souvenir shop owned and run by his parents, curiosities are strewn across the room. Two top hats, one on its side and another sitting on yet another skull, symbolise bourgeois mores and the artist’s desire to see them overthrown. A suggestive-looking clam shell is propped behind the chair and against a roll of yet to be used canvas, perhaps an allusion to Ensor’s problematic relationships with the opposite sex and his fear, as he saw it, of women’s potential to compromise his artistic output. Relatedly, a female carnival mask looks upwards from the bottom centre of the work, as if in silent rebuke of the artist’s ineffectual endeavour, forever unmoved by his art and worse, never seeing it.

The paintings shown on the walls are Ensor’s own. For example, at top centre, picked out by its black frame, we can see Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, another bitter and self-lacerating commentary on the worthlessness of things that people dispute, including an artist’s output.

James Ensor, Two Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring (1891), oil on panel, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels

It reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges’ comment about the futility of the Falklands war fought between the UK and Argentina which he likened to ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’.

Showing Ensor own artworks displayed in such a self-referential way indicates that this is doubtless a representation of the artist’s actual studio (which he kept on the second floor of his parents’ house above their shop in Ostend) and that the skeleton pictured here doing the painting, so incongruously attired in a conventional if colourful blue suit, stands for the artist himself. But another way to look at this is to see the central figure as a personification of Death, and it is Death who has laboured at these works and in the process, destroyed the fleshy corporeality of the artist formerly known as James Ensor.

This might seem unduly morbid and doom-laden and yet this is an interior shown to be suffused with light and refulgent colour, almost theatrical in its intensity. From the gilt frames on many of the paintings to the ochre colour wall and the golden easel (a feature which is given such centrality and ceremonial prominence), and in muted contrast to the beautifully complementary pale blues of the floor, the painted skies and the suit, this is a work which seems to luxuriate in benign luminosity. Added to this, the carnivalesque mask and the twiddly tassels on the end of the paint brushes suggest the performance of a celebratory ritual in which objects ornament and decorate a space, props which acts as sacramental reinforcements to the necessary and persistent life-affirming resistance to extinction.