James Ensor was born to an English father and a Flemish mother, shopkeepers in the coastal town of Ostend. They kept a store or market stall there which catered to the tastes of holidaymakers, selling bricabrac, toys, beach articles and the grotesque carnival masks which were traditionally worn in the local Shrove Tuesday processions. These parades and the masks were to figure prominently in Ensor's work, notably his monumental painting, Christ Entering into Brussels, monumental not only for its size but for its merciless depiction of the cruelty, vanity, hypocrisy and fatuousness which the artist perceived all around him in mid-19th-century Belgian society.
But the young artist, an acknowleged master in his 20's, did not silence his disgust. He expressed it in some of the most scathing and original works of art ever created. His reviled and renowned Christ Entering... is only the most famous, but the whole body of his work, which includes more than 160 etchings as well as hundreds of paintings and drawings, is a brilliant denunciation, not only of the morally bankrupt Belgian--and by extension European--society of his day, but also an advance on the homicidal folly which was to ensue in the 20th century.
