Light stripped of leaves

In 1936 James Ensor was 76 and had been made a baron seven years earlier. He was still painting in Ostend, the seaside town where his family had kept a shop selling shells, masks and curios, and those objects kept turning up on his canvases. In his last decades he painted many still lifes of this kind, pale and shimmering, with shells and flowers set out on a draped table, and he gave them fanciful titles. He called this one Lumières effeuillées, which means something like lights stripped of their leaves, the way a flower sheds its petals. The canvas came to Liège through Max Goebel-Fuerison, a local industrialist and collector who in 1968 left the city 27 works of art, with Ensor strongly represented among them. In 2026 the museum chose this painting as the lead image for its exhibition marking La Boverie's first ten years.