James Ensor, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, 1889, Oil on Canvas, 3 x 4 feet, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Ensor was born in 1860 to an Englishman father and a Belgian mother. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he cofounded Les XX, an avant-garde exhibition society. Returning to his hometown of Ostend, he set up a studio. In 1887, Ensor began one of his most ambitious works “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, a monumental six-foot tall drawing, drawn on fifty-one separate sheets of paper. Two years later, he painted his “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”.
James Ensor was very passionate about the use of light in his canvases. He filled his canvases with it. In some of Ensor’s work, light is a radiant substance bathing children; and in others, light becomes a heavy presence, bright with movement and luminosity.
Light for Ensor also could be allegorical, splitting the sky open in a violent visible burst, as the piercing hand of God expelling Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. It could also fill the heavens, as in the image above, out of which the rebel angels fell. The chaos in the light is painted chaotically with dense brushstrokes emphasizing the tumult.