James Ensor Belgian; 1860—1949

James Ensor helped to found the avant-garde group Les Vingt (The Twenty) in Brussels in 1883. Working outside traditional institutional systems of academies and Salons, Les Vingt also engaged in a critical dialogue with other progressive artistic movements. Shortly after leaving the group, Ensor took up still-life painting, perhaps seeking to reconnect with art-historical traditions through this time-honored genre.

In this work, he made clear references to seventeenth-century Flemish examples, dutifully including objects that project over the edge of the table into the viewer’s space, such as the oyster at the left, a device Baroque painters commonly used to convey their illusionistic skill. However, while traditional marine still lifes feature bountiful market arrangements of fresh, often still-alive catches from the ocean, in Ensor’s interpretation, the fish and crustaceans lie dead, evenly spaced, and surrounded by empty shells. Furthermore the artist imposed an intense, unnatural, red illumination, offset only by white, impastoed high-lights and a few pieces of colorful earthenware. This tonality creates a somewhat unappetizing mood, at odds not only with the works of Ensor’s Baroque predecessors but also with those of his fellow nineteenth-century practitioners of the genre, such as Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir. These artists typically made little effort to conceal the studio setting of their still-life arrangements, while Ensor placed his objects in a more ambiguous space suggestive of a merchant’s stall or a kitchen. (The actual location may very well have been his mother’s Ostend curiosity shop, where he could have encountered many of the exotic shells that populate this canvas.) Ensor’s still lifes—enigmatic in content and painterly in style—would attract the German Expressionists in the early decades of the twentieth century.