James Ensor in his Ostend studio, 1937. Photograph by Maurice Anthony. © 2025 James Ensor / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As a boy, Ensor was fascinated by the ornaments of his family’s souvenir shops in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend: the assortment of curios that spilled out onto the pavement to attract customers created a magical world for the young artist and nourished his imagination from an early age. “My grandparents had in Ostend,” the artist later recalled, “a shop selling sea shells, lace, rare stuffed fish, old books, prints, jams, china, an inextricable assortment of objects constantly being knocked over by cats, noisy parrots and a monkey,” Ensor once recalled. “This exceptional milieu without doubt developed my artistic faculties and my grandmother was my great inspiration” (quoted in Patricia G. Berman, James Ensor: Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 6).

Following his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Ensor returned to his parents’ home, where he would maintain a studio for decades. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, he was involved in establishing the formative artistic groups Les XX and La Libre Esthétique, but he rarely ventured abroad, finding ample artistic stimuli at home. Central to this domestic inspiration was the motley array of fantastical ornaments and ephemera from his family stores that filled the house and studio and formed the basis for his still life compositions.

Teeming with seashells, vessels and other personal effects of the artist, Poissons et coquillages immerses the viewer in the poetic universe of James Ensor. As Emile Verhaeren expounded in 1908, “Anyone who surprised Ensor at work upstairs would see him emerge from a clutter of disparate objects: masks, rags, withered branches, shells, cups, pots, worn-out rugs, books littering the floor, prints piled up on chairs, empty frames standing stacked against the furniture, and the inevitable skull surveying the scene with two vacant sockets and no eyes. A friendly layer of dust lies over these innumerable strange objects, protecting them from the clumsy movements of visitors. They are waiting for the painter to breathe life into them, to make them speak, and, thanks to the sympathy he has with them and the eloquence he discerns in their silence, to introduce them into his paintings” (Emile Verhaeren, Sur James Ensor, Brussels, 1990).

Fig. 1 Pieter Claesz, Fish, 1647, Pushkin Museum , Moscow
Fig. 2 Balthasar van der Ast, Still life with Seashells, 1625, Phoenix Museum of Art

In both theme and execution, Poissons et coquillages shares an affinity with the still lifes of Northern Renaissance masters. A warm, enveloping light suffuses every part of the present work—as if itself emanating from the studio interior— reflecting Ensor’s enthusiasm for capturing luminosity in the tradition of Dutch still lifes (see figs. 1 and 2). The clear, almost glowing quality of Flemish light is enhanced by the careful, prismatic interplay of color across the reflective surfaces of the glassware, seashells and fish scales.

Fig. 3 James Ensor, Les Poissardes mélancholiques, 1892, sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 2015 for $7 million © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The present work dates to the height of Ensor’s creative powers, by which time he had fully embraced the fantastical imagery for which he is best known (see fig. 3). The fish that anchor the composition function as a symbol of vita brevis, a trope of Renaissance still life painting, and point towards the artist’s predilection for macabre motifs. His emphasis on the grotesque and fanciful was picked up by the Expressionists and Surrealists decades later.

According to Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, more than half of Ensor’s drawings and one third of his paintings are still lifes, a testament to his overwhelming interest in the genre: "The still life enabled Ensor throughout his career to develop new pictorial techniques, to explore possible compositions and to create new things of his own. Right to the very end, it provided him with a compliant subject that offered an infinite variety of technical possibilities, ranging from realism by way of naturalism and Impressionism to the diaphanous colours and undulating lines of Art Nouveau. The still life genre highlights the evolution of Ensor’s oeuvre, helping us to make out a succession of different periods, each summed up in a handful of key works" (Exh. Cat., Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Ensor, 1999, p. 32).  

The present work featured in several major retrospectives of the artist spanning the past century, including those held at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kunsthaus in Zürich and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Held in the pioneering collection of Rolf & Margit Weinberg for over forty years, Poissons et coquillages comes to auction for the first time.