James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949)[1] was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life.

Ensor himself lacked interest in academic study and left school at the age of fifteen to begin his artistic training with two local painters.

[9] Even in the first decade of the 20th century, however, Ensor's production of new works was diminishing, and he increasingly concentrated on music—although he had no musical training, he was a gifted improviser on the harmonium, and spent much time performing for visitors.

While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favored increasingly bizarre subject matter.

Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colorful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes.

Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colors and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom.

"[15] In this composition, which elaborates a theme treated by Ensor in his drawing Les Aureoles du Christ of 1885, a vast carnival mob in grotesque masks advances toward the viewer.

[14] Another stated "He would still paint pictures magnificently vigorous and bold, but they would be exceptions rather than the rule" noting works such as Our Two Portraits (1905), The Deliverance of Andromeda (1925), Port of Ostend (1933) and Ensor at the Harmonium (1933).

Ensor turned more and more to music in his later years, playing the harmonium and even composing a ballet-pantomime in one act, The Scale of Love (1907), complete with an original libretto, sets and costumes.

[22] Ensor himself recognized that the prints were a key part of his artistic legacy, stating in a letter to Albert Croquez in 1934: "Yes, my intention is to go on working for a long time yet so that generations to come may hear me.

My intention is to survive, and I think of the solid copper plate, the unalterable ink, easy reproduction, faithful prints, and I adopt etching as a means of expression.

As Los Angeles County Museum of Art CEO and Wallis Annenberg director Michael Govan has explained: "James Ensor's signature style—his radical distortion of form, his ambiguous space, his riotous color, his muddled surfaces, and his proclivity for the bizarre—both anticipated and influenced modernist movements from symbolism and German expressionism to dada and surrealism.

The film's director, Jan Bucquoy, is also the creator of a comic Le Bal du Rat mort  [fr] inspired by Ensor.

[33] An exhibition of approximately 120 works by James Ensor was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2009, and then at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009 to February 2010.

[35] From October 2016 through January 2017, the Royal Academy of Arts in London hosted a major exhibition of Ensor's paintings and etchings, curated by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans.

In the movie Halloween (1978), a poster of one of Ensor's self-portraits appears on the wall of a room in Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) home.