Entry
This still life is arranged on a wooden board supported on two square wooden boxes. It shows a large fish head, a knife with an ivory handle, a glass filled almost to the brim with white wine, a dark reddish-brown wine bottle, a herring lying on a white napkin, a blue water jug, a large red lobster in front of a white porcelain pot with blue decoration, and a large crab lying on its back. There is a small black mask dangling beneath the lobster. On the left is a figure with a white Pierrot face and a chef’s hat on his head, dressed in blue and red.
Belgian fishermen fished crustaceans from the North Sea in limited quantities. For many centuries, they were only eaten in coastal areas and were not yet considered delicacies. Above the still life on the table, we can just about make out the remains of an inscription that descends diagonally. Technical research has revealed that Ensor wrote the words Vive Carême
(Long live lent
) here, but appears to have had second thoughts and paint it out. Apart from the wine, this still life could be interpreted as a sort of parody on the meagre meal that Christians consume during the annual pre-Easter fast. This forty-day-long fast is often preceded by Carnival celebrations. Perhaps Ensor, who was undoubtedly an atheist, toyed with the idea of conceiving his painting as a humorous, and mildly grotesque representation of an important religious custom: after celebrating Carnival, Pierrot is confronted with the culinary expectations of the next forty days.
Masks from Carnival folklore first appear in Ensor’s work in the Temptation of Saint Anthony and the Ordeal of Saint Anthony, respectively a drawing and a painting, both of which date from 1887.
Over the course of 60 years, Ensor painted more than 230 still lifes, amounting to a third of his painted oeuvre. With the exception of a short break around 1885/88, he painted at least one still life a year. He considered the still life the most important genre and the touchstone of the true colourist
.
Ensor first introduced masks as characters in his 1889 still life entitled Attributes of the Fine Arts (the painting is a reworking of a still life of circa 1883). He used similar masks looming into the pictorial space from the side and rear in his large 1896 still life, Masks and Vases. He also displayed masks alongside other objects in Attributes of the Fine Arts of 1883 and 1889. A masked character of the type that appears in this still life, looming over an arrangement of objects on a table, is not something that occurs very often in Ensor’s oeuvre. However, the blue water jug pops up several times in Ensor’s still lifes of the 1890s.
During various periods in his career, Ensor revealed a marked preference for using small, pre-prepared panels for his paintings and drawings. In 1886, he painted the Descent from the Cross in grisaille on a 60 cm x 47 cm panel. This was one of six images in his Visions series, Christ’s Haloes or the Sensitivities of Light: (6) the Peaceful and Serene. Ensor may have become acquainted with the qualities of pre-prepared panels as supports when seeking out the right materials for this pastiche of a late Medieval religious scene. He used panels of increasingly smaller size during the decade that followed.
Ensor undoubtedly chose the various motifs – the fish head, herring, lobster and crab – for their whimsical forms. He limited the illusion of volume and space by depicting his objects head-on at eye level, which serves to emphasise their quirky shapes. Black contours accentuate this further. His other paintings and drawings on small pre-prepared panels of the same period were dominated by ornamental arabesques. Technical research revealed that he overpainted a small green pot behind the crab. He must have done this to optimise the composition. It is unclear how he worked up the area between the two wooden boxes supporting the table top.
