Still Life in the Studio

James Ensor's Still Life in the Studio (1889) is one of the Belgian Symbolist master's studio subjects — the objects of his working environment painted with the combined curiosity and strangeness that characterized his entire production. Ensor's studio in Ostend was a richly eccentric environment — stuffed animals, carnival masks, shells, Chinese porcelain, and other accumulated objects — and his still lifes from this setting combine conventional still life form with the uncanny atmosphere that pervades all his mature work. By 1889 he was already producing the mask paintings for which he would become most famous.

Ensor's still life technique is distinctive within Belgian painting: looser and more gestural than academic convention, with a palette that begins incorporating the unexpected color combinations — acid yellows, pale violets, strange pinks — that would intensify in his mask paintings. His brushwork is varied and sometimes agitated, giving the objects a quality of uneasy life. The studio setting adds reflective, dimly lit qualities to the scene — the specific light of a working artist's indoor space with its accumulated disorder.