James Ensor

James Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker who spent almost his whole life in the seaside town of Ostend, where his family kept a souvenir shop selling carnival masks. Masks, skeletons and grotesque crowds fill his strongest work, painted in harsh, bright colour, and he is seen as a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism. His largest painting, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, is in the J. Paul Getty Museum. He was made a baron by King Albert I in 1929.