The Belgian artist James Ensor was among the most enigmatic artists of his time. The son of middle-class merchants in the sea resort community of Ostend, he was encouraged to become an artist by his parents and protected by them from the economic pressures of such a life. In this supportive environment, he developed an utterly personal, Symbolist art that was appreciated for many years by only a few critics, artists, and patrons. He showed his work with various avant-garde groups, most notably Les Vingt, the Belgian organization whose exhibitions were the most daring in Europe in the late 1880's. Ensor’s masterpieces from the 1880's come less from visual reality than from the artist’s fertile imagination. They describe a world of fantasy, fear, and violence; and they are painted in vivid colors with a directness and emotionality that rival the art of Vincent van Gogh. Yet, where van Gogh’s symbols are to be found in the real world, those of Ensor rarely are. In Ensor’s paintings, faces are replaced by masks, bodies by skeletons.

The black comedy and fierce social satire of Ensor’s most characteristic paintings can be contrasted with his still lifes. His still lifes from the early 1880's were painted in a dark, heavy manner that derived from earlier Dutch prototypes. However, by 1887, Ensor’s still lifes became lighter, brighter, and more bizarre in their subjects. Inspired by the tradition of marine still lifes in seventeenth-century Northern art, Still Life with Fish and Shells is an accomplished, highly finished painting. Ensor seems to have been particularly interested here in shiny, hard objects — animate and inanimate — whose iridescent, pearly hues he could explore with scumbled, bravura brushwork more at home in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. There is unsettling, even creepy, about this arrangement.