Landscape with waterfalls

Landscape with waterfalls (1875) by James Ensor, now in the collection of Mu.ZEE - Kunstmuseum aan Zee, represents the artist's engagement with landscape as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between direct observation and pictorial structure, light, and atmosphere. James Ensor was one of the most anarchic and visionary painters of the late 19th century. Growing up in Ostend, Belgium, surrounded by his family's shop selling carnival masks and seashells, he developed a grotesque imagery of masked figures, skeletons, and social satirical tableaux that baffled his contemporaries but influenced generations of Expressionist and Surrealist artists.

Ensor applied paint with raw, sometimes deliberately crude strokes that convey grotesque energy rather than technical refinement. His palette is lurid and confrontational — acid yellows, harsh magentas, sickly greens — creating a carnival atmosphere of unease.