Featured on PDR in the collection James Ensor, The Deadly Sins (ca. 1904)

Perhaps no modern artist better exemplified the charge issued by Baudelaire in his 1862 essay “Painters and etchers” — “etching is a profound and dangerous art, filled with treachery, which reveals the faults of an artist’s mind as clearly as his virtues” — than James Ensor (1860–1949). Aside from an incomplete course of study at Brussels’ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, the institution he called an “establishment for the near-blind”, the artist spent the near entirety of his life in the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Here he lived in his parents’ home into his late fifties, largely financed by his mother and aunt Mimi’s souvenir shop, which sold papier-mâché carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and Asian curios. His early realist and romantic paintings impressed critics, with…