Between the Studio and the Salon: The Intimate Theatre of James Ensor’s Interiors

Abstract

In the 1880s the Belgian artist James Ensor painted a number of interiors that map out a geography of the home and its compelling discourses of public and private, gender and class, intimacy and interiority. Some of these interiors observe with direct, realist regard the Ensor family salon, a space then allied with the feminine sphere and middle-class values, where the artist, his sister, mother and aunt can be seen performing the rituals, decorum and tedium of petit bourgeois life. Later in the decade, Ensor transforms these interior views into theatre-like stages with tilting floors and wings filled with puppet figures, props, costumes, instruments, and masks. Merging the studio with the salon and observation with artifice, these later interiors serve as spaces of performance where Ensor gives form to his subjectivity and imagination while also engaging in social commentary and critique. This essay will examine the intimate theatre of Ensor’s interiors and the social and symbolic meaning and expressive potential that he found in this exchange between body and place, studio and salon.

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