Entry
In a room, two skeletons fight each other. Both are wearing women's clothes. One is wearing a long skirt, a grey scarf and a strange high pointed hat topped with, lying on its back, a dead green bird. A long tongue dangles from the skeleton's open mouth. The other skeleton wears a slightly shorter red skirt, black boots, a connecting coat and a hat with flowers. In its hand, it holds a red parasol. One skeleton pokes threateningly with a long corner broom against the chest of the skeleton with the red skirt. The latter swings a broom with a short handle. Between the two, shown in foreshortened perspective, is a third skeleton in women's clothing. This one is reaching with its left and right hand for the skirts of the warring skeletons. Between the two warring skeletons, against the wall behind, hangs a character, dressed in a long white vest, with black boots, one of which is badly damaged. This has the face of a Japanese devil mask and from his mouth dangles a very long dark tongue. The figure appears to be suspended by a dark rope. On his chest is a sign hanging from a rope around his neck. On that plate is written civet
. The four figures are connected by several thin, dark ropes. In the front left is a skeleton wearing a top hat and holding a bottle. The figure wears a white shirt and green tabard and black boots. To the right, the face of a mask emerges, pointing a finger at the character with the bottle. The room is bare with a simple plank floor. The wall at the back has a high dark blue plinth, just above it a narrow light green band and a second green band above the doorways. To the left and right, there is an open door. Through those doors, a number of masks enter the room. On the right we see six masks with the appearance of characters from the Belgian folk carnival, one has the head of a rodent. Through the left doorway, six masks depicting characters from Africa and Asia emerge. Both groups are led by an armed character. One has a razor in his hand the other a kitchen knife. The skeletons, the hanged and some masked characters all have dark hands, as if wearing gloves.
The interior is probably that of Ensor's attic studio, which we also recognise in The Astonishment of Mask Wouse (1889), Painting Skeletons (1896) and Skeletons in the Studio (1900). Though Ensor added a doorway on the left. The masks are the same ones Ensor previously depicts in The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888-90), The Astonishment of Mask Wouse (1889) or The Intrigue (1890). Ensor also used the hat with flowers and the red parasol in The Astonishment of Mask Wouse (1889).
Following in Libby Tannenbaum's footsteps, Gert Schiff has suggested reading the painting as the portrayal of the strained relations between Ensor's housemates: his alcoholic father, his mother, live-in aunt Mimi and his sister Mitche. The hanged man destined, according to the inscription civet
, to end up in a ragout would then be an alter ego of the artist. Letters sent by James and occasionally Mitche Ensor to Ernest and Mariette Rousseau-Hannon confirm that, at least during the last years of his life, Ensor's father wandered around Ostend several times for long periods drunk and was occasionally hospitalised. But there is no mention yet of discord between the other members of the family, which only surfaces in the letters of the 1990s. Even in other cases such as The Intrigue (1890), the idea that the characters presented depict situations from family life turns out to be unfounded.
In Ensor's work, the skeleton sometimes personifies death, a menacing character, but most often skeletons are alter egos for human beings. As a skeleton, every human action inevitably becomes absurd.
Alcohol abuse, especially among workers, increased during the 19th century in the industrialised world, and measures to address this social problem were devised by progressive and conservative politicians and writers until the 20th century. The idea that men, in singleness bourgeois, are often and easily victimised by the reprehensible seductive arts of all kinds of women was very popular at the end of the 19th century, and the literature, theatre, opera, and visual arts of those days are permeated by this theme. Neither motif is presented in a narratively coherent manner in this painting. Yet there is in fact no reason to connect representations of seductive ladies and femmes fatales or aspects of drinking in James Ensor's work with his biography. Three ladies compete with each other. Are the flower hat and the dead green bird enough to recognise prostitutes in them? One has lost out. Characters fighting with each other and other forms of aggression we see Ensor's work several times from 1886 onwards. These include the etchings Christ Insulted (1886), The Scourging (1886), The Fight of the Liceheads Desired and Baked (1888), Devils Rousting Angels and Archangels (1888), The Murder (1888), The Joke of the Elephant (1888). Often the fight takes on a macabre and absurd character. The eye sockets of all skeletons and masks feature an eyeball or an eye: they are alive. These living dead, skeletons, fight a pointless battle over a dead body. In this respect, the depiction is similar to Skeletons Fighting over a Buckling (1891), scenes in which carnival guests threaten death or the Skeletons in the Studio (1900) and Fair with Blood Sausage (1901). In the scenes from a photo novel that may have been made on 15 April 1892, Ensor and his younger friend Ernest Rousseau Jr play out similar fight scenes in the dunes where they attack each other with bones and skulls. In the painting, Ensor makes grateful use of the varied facial expressions of the surprised, happy or furious masks but the role of these folk
and non-Western
mask characters, who enter the room through the doorways on the left and right, armed with a knife, is not clear: do they come to the aid of the hanged mask character or do they take sides with one of the fighting ladies. The tongue hanging out of the hanged man's mouth shows that the man is dead. Ensor had a particular preference for depicting long tongues. In Skeletons in Travesty (1896), male
and female
skeletons kiss each other with extremely long tongues.
The frontal depiction of several characters in a bare room with the doors swinging open at the back has reminded several authors of a stage scene. The skeletons and the hanged man are connected by a few threads. As a result, the scene recalls puppet theatre, as it was rediscovered in the 2nd half of the 19th century. The hanging man is short and looks somewhat as a puppet. The pose of the contending skeletons reminded Lydia Schoonbaert of a print after Botticelli, while Vanbeselaere thinks of Bruegel's The Battle Between Lent and Carnival (1559). Whether Ensor knew this composition we do not know but he was already an aficionado of Bruegel's art around 1890 and he found in Bruegel's prints models for satires in panorama such as Baths in Ostend (1890). Ensor was also an aficionado of Goya's art who presents fighting characters in a similar manner several times in his prints. Ensor rendered the skeleton that fell between the contending ladies in foreshortened form. Like the composition at half-length employed by Ensor in the etch Caesar’s Denarius (1889) and The Intrigue (1890), here again he employs a mode of representation rarely seen in the 19th century. Whether he was inspired by a reproduction of a Renaissance painting such as Mantegna's famous Lamentation of the Dead Christ (c.1480), we do not know - so to what extent he here quotes a religious motif while swaning
we do not know either.
The design is rather sketchy. Some motifs, almost all hands, are rendered extremely succinctly. To improve the legibility of the garments, contours are accentuated here and there. A rudimentary rendering of facial features is also typical of the masks Ensor uses, adding to the pictorial coherence of the painting. In this painting, however, Ensor does not use the prominent decorative, expressive and whimsical arabesques that are characteristic of the drawings and paintings on small panels Ensor produces in these years. The character appearing at the bottom right (is it a mask or a caricature?), pointing to the fallen drunken skeleton in the other corner or the defeated lady against the floor, was not part of the initial design and was applied by Ensor over the dry layers of paint.
In the still lifes Ensor painted from 1889, he began to experiment with working out the background as an important component of the picture. Occasionally, he evokes mother of pearl. It is difficult to make out whether Ensor intended to elaborate the wall at the back in a similar way. The painting was badly damaged and heavily
restored at the end of World War II in exactly that zone.
Ensor showed this work at Les XX in February 1891. This means that the painting was fully or mostly completed before the end of 1890. The iconography did not please everyone but a conservative critic like Gustave Lagye, nevertheless appreciated ses qualités de franc coloriste et sa pâte solide. Je lui laisse pour compte ses masques, ses pendus et ses squelettes (...)
.
