mother owned a seaside souvenir shop; family lived upstairs
Académie des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1877)
1877 – studies at Académie des Beaux-Arts Brussels simultaneously with Fernand Khnopff
1880s – exhibits in Brussels at Chrysalide gallery at Cercle Artistique, and with L’ Essor; exhibits at Paris Salon
1883 – founder-member of Les XX
1893 – Lex XX disbands; Ensor excluded from La Libre Esthétique
1896 – Belgian government purchases Lamp Boy; Ensor’s first one-man show (Brussels)
1898 – the Parisian magazine Plume organizes exhibition of Ensor’s work
1903 – Ensor made Knight of the Order of Leopold
1908 – publication of Emile Verhaeren’s monograph on Ensor
1920 – performance of Ensor’s ballet-pantomime, The Scale of Love
1929 – Ensor made a baron
Russian Music, 1881 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels)
Scandalized Masks, 1883 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels)
Tribulations of St Anthony, 1887 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The Intrigue, 1911 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
Berman, Patricia G. James Ensor: Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002
Jonsson, Stefan. “Society Degree Zero: Christ, Communism, and the Madness of Crowds in the Art of James Ensor,” Representations, no. 75 (Summer 2001): 1-32
Lesko, Diane. James Ensor, the Creative Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985
Schiff, Gert. “Ensor the Exorcist,” Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H.W. Janson. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1981, pp. 719-37
Swinbourne, Anna. James Ensor. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009