Flowers and Chinese Vases

James Ensor spent almost his whole life in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, mostly in the house he shared with his mother and aunt, who ran a shop on the ground floor. It sold what a resort crowd bought, seashells, fans, painted porcelain, and the carnival masks that would crowd his most famous pictures. The Chinese vases in this 1896 still life came from that stock, ordinary shop goods carried upstairs to serve as props. By this date the uproar of the 1880s, when even the avant-garde group he belonged to had refused one of his works, had mostly passed, and he was painting the things within reach: flowers, glass, the blue-and-white china of the family trade. He arranged them for their colour rather than their meaning, treating the shop's exotic imports as nothing stranger than a vase of flowers on a table.