Introduction

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) houses the largest and most diverse collection of works by James Ensor in the world, comprising 39 paintings, more than 600 drawings and an extensive Ensor archive. The KMSKA launched the Ensor Research Project (ERP) in 2013 to establish its position as the world’s foremost James Ensor knowledge and information centre. This project takes stylistic, iconographic and technical approaches to the study of Ensor’s work.  The research is led by Herwig Todts (Curator, KMSKA), including contributions over the years from researchers Karen Bonne, Annelies Rios-Casier, Geert van der Snickt and the VZW Arcobaleno. Initial results were presented at the ‘James Ensor's Creative Process. Technique, Concept, Image’ symposium on 20 November 2015 in Antwerp. 1

The technical research was begun by restorer/researcher Karen Bonne (now working at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage [KIK-IRPA]), and has been continued since 2021 by Annelies Rios-Casier, doctoral student at the University of Antwerp. This research focuses on the following research questions:

• How did Ensor create his paintings, with particular attention to every layer of the painting, including the support, ground layer, underdrawing, paint layers and varnish?
• What materials and techniques did Ensor use and how did these evolve over the course of his career?
• Did Ensor’s artistic choices impact the stability of his paintings?

The ERP has conducted technical research into many paintings from both Belgium and abroad.  Research has been carried out into most of the paintings in the KMSKA collection with the intention of ultimately conducting in-depth studies on all its paintings. These works have been thoroughly analysed and each of their layers – from the support and ground layer to the paint layers, pigments and varnish – have been described in detail.

The ERP is striving to gain an in-depth understanding of Ensor's artistic process and his evolution as an artist over the years by closely studying every aspect of his technique and use of materials. For each work of art, the scholarly catalogue aims to provide an insight into the ongoing research in terms of art history and material technology, supported by various research techniques. The Online Scholarly Catalogue is a work in progress, the research content and functional features are stille being modified. 

Ensor Collection in Antwerp

Thanks to the joint efforts of François Franck (1872 - 1932), the members of the Antwerp exhibition association Kunst van Heden / L'Art contemporain and the curators of the Royal Museum, the Antwerp collection has grown since the interwar period into the most important Ensor collection in the world. The KMSKA is home to the greatest number of paintings by Ensor’s hand anywhere. It is also the only collection where visitors are able to learn about the full iconographic, stylistic and technical diversity of Ensor's oeuvre. Moreover, the museum has a significant collection of Ensor ‘masterpieces’, protected by the Flemish government’s special Heritage Decree. These are Skeletons Fighting over the Body of a Hanged Man (1891), The Man of Sorrows (1891), Afternoon in Ostend (1881), The Bourgeois Salon (1881), The Oyster Eater (1882), The Rooftops of Ostend (1884), The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1889), The Intrigue (1890) and The Baths at Ostend (1890).

Thanks to head curators Walther Vanbeselaere (KMSKA 1951-1973) and Lydia Schoonbaert (1969-1984), and curator Marcel De Maeyer (ca. 1948-1960), the Royal Museum was able to develop into a centre for Ensor expertise from the 1950s. In 2004, the KMSKA and the organisation launched a series of exhibitions in Spain, Japan, Mexico, Belgium and the Netherlands, exploring various aspects of the Ensor collection. This allowed the museum to collect new data and develop new understandings, including insights into Ensor's studies at the art academy in Brussels. Questions regarding the exact significance of Hokusai and other Japanese sources of inspiration (2005) for Ensor's work and the ways in which he drew upon life-model studies and copies of his contemporaries’ work (2010) have also been explored. The critical significance of the examples set by Francisco Goya and Odilon Redon were addressed during an unusual exhibition project in 2009: Goya, Redon, Ensor. Grotesque paintings and drawings. At the same time, the museum engaged in intense collaborative work to organise Ensor exhibitions in Wuppertal (Von der Heydt-Museum), New York (The Drawing Centre & MoMA), Paris (Musée d'Orsay), Toyota (Art Museum) and The Hague (Gemeentemuseum). In 2013, when the ERP was first launched, and throughout the years that followed, exhibition projects were realised in collaboration with Ordrupgaard (Denmark), Kunstmuseum Basel, J.P. Getty Museum Los Angeles and the Chicago Art Institute, Kunsthal Mannheim and the Royal Academy in London. The PhD dissertation ‘James Ensor, Occasional Modernist. Ensor’s Artistic and Social Ideas and the Interpretation of his Art’, which Herwig Todts defended at the University of Ghent in 2013, formed the basis of the art historical part of the Ensor Research Project. In 2018, Brepols Publishers published this research in unabridged English translation. 2

Methodology

The technical research of the paintings requires the combination of a wide range of research techniques. This is the only way to develop a comprehensive and in-depth picture of the structure of the work and the materials and techniques used by the artist. The research begins with a visual study in which the painting is examined in depth with the naked eye or under magnification (magnifying headset, stereo microscope and 3D microscope). This allows a lot of relevant information to be gathered and the identification of the painting’s areas of interest to be established from the outset.

We combine visual study with imaging techniques. This allows us to examine and photograph the painting under different wavelengths of light, resulting in images that show more than can be seen by the naked eye alone. For example, we can look at paintings under UV light which provides information about the painting’s surface and insights into the varnish used and old restorations. Infrared allows us look somewhat deeper into the paint layer and usually makes it possible to see if there is an underdrawing present. We also examine paintings with x-rays, which allows us to see through the painting, as it were. This provides information about the structure of the work. If there is a painting hidden beneath the paint layer, this technique will often make it visible. We can even take things a step beyond scanning paintings with x-rays. This is something that the researchers from the Arches and AXIS research groups from the University of Antwerp do for us with their MA-XRF scanner. This research technique scans the surface of a painting to acquire information about what pigments were used to create it. As x-rays penetrate deeper into the paint layer, they can make things that are not visible to the naked eye visible again. This allows compositions hidden beneath the paint layer to be digitally reconstructed.

The research techniques described above are all non-contact and non-destructive. This means that we do not touch the painting or damage it during examination. However, these research techniques do not always answer our research questions in full. As a final step in the research process, we sometimes use destructive research techniques. We then take a small piece of the paint layer – often less than 1mm² – and we analyse it in the lab or in the particle accelerator.

To obtain as full a picture as possible of a given painting, we combine all these research techniques. This allows us to gain a better understanding of the way in which Ensor worked.

Initial observations

Subject to further study, we are able to release some surprising and promising preliminary findings.

We have discovered that several striking changes were made to some of the paintings in the museum’s collection during the process of their creation. For example, The Skeleton Painter (1896) contains a noteworthy change that completely transformed the composition and significance of the original painting. Ensor began this work by making a pencil copy of a photograph of himself posing at his painter’s easel in his attic studio at his parents’ house in Ostend on a pre-prepared panel. This self-portrait of the painter is clearly recognisable on the infrared image. However, during the course of realisation, Ensor overpainted his own head with a skull. We can also see adjustments and painted-out letters in the background of the Man of Sorrows (1891) and a completely overpainted academic study of a bearded man under paint layer of Still Life with Chinoiseries (1880).

Less spectacular, but nonetheless of fundamental importance, is our growing understanding of Ensor’s artistic practice. Ensor's urge to experiment is first and foremost evidenced by the range of different iconographic, stylistic, material and technical concepts that he used in different ways. His way of creating paintings is often experimental too. Contrary to popular belief, he did not lose this urge to experiment after 1900. In the course of the realisation process, Ensor did not strive for the optimal composition, but rather sought out highly refined colour effects (in his writings, he called ‘colour the ornament of our spiritual wedding’ 3) and ways to depict movement and volume. Up to 1885, his way of working could be called traditional or classical – his training at the art academy in Brussels may well have been of critical importance to this. Furthermore, he only became acquainted with the new working methods and the new palette of the French Impressionists at the exhibitions of the art group Les XX from 1885 onwards. Prior to 1885, Ensor used a lot of mixed paints (earth colours supplemented with accent colours) which meant his colour palette was darker. In these years, the structure of his paint layers was often complex and he painted from reality. After 1885, he usually employed his colours pure, sometimes mixing them wet on wet on the canvas itself, or else mixing them with white on the palette first. From then on, the subject matter of his paintings changed and he began to include masks, skeletons and grotesque figures. In Ensor’s later period, he used more dilute and transparent paint and allowed the ground to play a role as an area of colour.

In matters of technique, Ensor’s extensive and virtuoso use of the palette knife is particularly striking. But he also painted with his thumb or scratched into the paint layer with the back end of his brush. He may have made occasional creative use of layers of varnish too, but to date we lack certainty as to the state in which Ensor ‘delivered’ his paintings.

When he worked on panels, he made extensive pencil underdrawings and followed them closely during the realisation process. On his canvases, there are occasional brown or blue sketch lines in oil paint of parts of the composition. These design lines are in many cases hard to see are often integrated into the end result.

Ensor's reputation as a poor craftsman is not borne out by facts. He did not use the cheapest of materials. On the contrary, he used standard materials: hard cardboard (for a few studies), canvas (linen, sometimes double-weave, and occasionally cotton), and solid wood panels with a commercially applied preparation layer. Ensor painted with oil paints available from the trade specialists of his time. Research by Dr. Geert Van der Snickt revealed that he had a surprisingly strong preference for lead white (many of his fellow painters opted more readily for zinc white). From 1900, he preferred a distinctly impressionistic palette and made extensive use of zinc white. Ensor’s search for an increasingly intense yellow ran parallel to his stylistic quest for more intense colours. 4

Generally speaking, Ensor’s paintings are still in good condition. For the time being, the discolouration of the cadmium yellow and the fading of the red lake are the most striking examples of degradation in Ensor's oeuvre. The intense cadmium yellow in Still Life with Chinoiseries of 1906 has lost its colour or turned brown in several places. Ensor used a red lake for the Man of Sorrows which shows up clearly under UV light, but when viewed by the naked eye has lost nearly all its strength. This red lake seems to have faded.

There is a transparent grey layer on top of the paint layer of several of Ensor’s paintings. It is currently unclear whether this grey layer is original and applied by Ensor, and whether it was always grey. Answering this question will help us better to determine whether this layer should be removed during restorations, as it dulls and darkens the colours significantly. After all, the research project is not only aimed at a thorough knowledge of the artist’s creative process. New insights can also support the conservation and restoration of Ensor’s art.

What have we learned to date?

Research has revealed that Ensor actually painted his Bathing Hut on the Beach (1876). This is because grains of sand can be found in the paint. It was long claimed that Ensor used poor quality materials: Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) was believed to have been painted with wall paint, but research carried out at the Getty determined that this was not so. 5 On the contrary, Ensor used expensive paint that he sometimes bought from Blockx, a company. That also supplied Monet.

Meanwhile, researchers have established that in his early, academic period, Ensor continued to construct his paintings in a very classical manner with multiple layers of paint. When he began to make his mask paintings, he abandoned this structure and placed his colours next to one another, using his paint pure and unmixed. This approach is something he borrowed from the Impressionists; he had seen work by Monet and Renoir in 1886.

The Ensor Research Project aims first and foremost to research all the Ensor paintings in the KMSKA collection as thoroughly as possible, followed by those in Mu.ZEE Ostend, and ideally then in all the major public and private collections in the Benelux. In her doctoral dissertation, Annelies Rios-Casier wants to investigate whether a number of findings can be confirmed in twelve key works, including Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (KMSKA), The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Still Life in the Studio (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and Skeletons in the Studio (National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa).