Still Life with Chinoiseries

The things on this marble-topped table came to Ostend by way of Paris. Ensor's mother and aunt ordered goods from the Far East through Siegfried Bing, the dealer whose shop gave Art Nouveau its name, and by 1906 Ensor had been painting that stock for more than 25 years. A small Chinese teapot, a Japanese wooden mask with oversized canine teeth, a blue vase holding a painted Japanese fan, and a woodblock print pinned up at the top left. He set out almost the same arrangement for three versions between 1906 and 1908, and this is the largest. It belonged to Alphonse Aerts, one of a circle of Antwerp collectors who clubbed together in 1921 to buy Ensors for this museum, and his family gave it in his memory in 1924. The paint went on thin, and the cadmium yellow in the print and the fan has faded since.