Lady with Red Parasol

This painting shows a young woman sitting on a chair holding a bright-red, open parasol in her left hand, its pole propped against her left shoulder. She is dressed in a long, dark-blue skirt with the toes of her shoes peeking out beneath, and a bright red jacket. All that is visible of the white blouse she is wearing under her jacket are the white collar and cuffs. The same female model is shown wearing the same clothes in a study for The Bourgeois Salon of 1880 (Galerie Ronny Van De Velde, Antwerp). There appears to be another clothing draped over the back of the chair. The chair seems to be a simple dining chair placed on top of a plain, rectangular wooden box. This same box appears elsewhere in various figure studies made in the studio by Ensor and Willy Finch.¹ A large charcoal and black chalk drawing from a private collection shows the same model in profile in exactly the same costume and pose. In this case, the artist – who may have been either Ensor or Willy Finch – was seated a little further to the left. The wooden box upon which the chair is placed is easier to make out in the drawing than in the painting. In the drawing, the young woman is shown with a bonnet on her head. It is clear to the naked eye that this white bonnet was overpainted in the painting. This observation was confirmed by the x-ray images made for research purposes.²

The young woman is Ensor’s younger sister Marie or Mitche (1861-1945) who frequently posed for her brother in the years 1880-85. We can find her distinctive mouth and the long bangs on her forehead in The Colourist (1881), The Oyster Eater (1882) and the lost painting, Haunted Furniture (1885 and 1888/90).

Dorine Cardijn posited that the artist painted the woman outdoors, but the background and foreground are represented so loosely that it is impossible to determine whether the young woman is shown indoors or out.³

In 1892, Ensor’s close friend, Eugène Demolder, commented upon a series of coquettes in Ensor’s work. This painting belongs to this series of young, and occasionally older, bourgeois women in various situations.⁴

The style of the painting is sketchy and the fore- and background are particularly loosely painted. The hands and white collar and cuffs of the blouse are also depicted in a very sketchy way. Here and there, the use of a palette knife also strikes the eye. This painting has a very different look to that of Girl with the Upturned Nose (1879), but the differences are less pronounced if we compare the faces in these two paintings. Ensor accentuated certain facial features in Lady with Red Parasol with a few fine, black brushstrokes. The entire composition is dominated by the bright red of the jacket and the more or less bright red area of the open parasol. The young woman's face stands out against this large, irregular red surface. Ensor must have painted over the white bonnet on her head so as not to disrupt this image.

Ensor dated this painting 1881 in the handwritten Liste de mes Oeuvres (List of my works) that he sent to Verhaeren in 1908 and Le Roy in 1922, the same year as Study for a Bourgeois Salon. Haesaerts dated the painting 1882.⁵ The technical study of the painting revealed that Ensor added his signature and the date to a dry paint layer. However, we do not know when he did this. It is not possible to date the work with greater precision on the basis of stylistic or technical observations. In the Liste de mes oeuvres, Ensor calls the painting Lady in Red, reminiscent of the titles that James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) gave to his works. Was Ensor already aware of his innovatory role as early as 1880-1882, or did he feel a need to emphasise this in any way possible after 1900?

Technical research has revealed a composition beneath the Lady with Red Parasol. The composition was partially reconstructed and shows a scene from the American War of Independence (1775-83). A medal honouring revolutionary war hero, General Daniel Morgan, had been reproduced in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and copied by Ensor in a sketchbook. We do not know whether Ensor later worked up this black-and-white drawing into an oil painting on his own initiative, or whether he did this as a studio exercise at the Brussels art academy.

Ensor first exhibited Lady with Red Parasol at Le Sillon in Brussels. Fellow artist, Adolphe Crespin (1859-1944), probably acquired it shortly thereafter. Crespin was a poster artist and a master of Art Nouveau sgraffito on the facades numerous Brussels bourgeois houses.

Dorine Cardijn, La dame au parasol rouge, Lydia Schoonbaert (ed.), James Ensor. Paris-Musées, 1990.
Xavier Tricot, James Ensor. Leven en werk. Oeuvrecatalogus van de schilderijen, Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009, nr. 165.
Herwig Todts, James Ensor, Occasional Modernist. Ensor’s Artistic and Social Ideas and the Interpretation of his Art, (XIX Studies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture), Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.

This painting shows a young woman sitting on a chair holding a bright-red, open parasol in her left hand, its pole propped against her left shoulder. She is dressed in a long, dark-blue skirt with the toes of her shoes peeking out beneath, and a bright red jacket. All that is visible of the white blouse she is wearing under her jacket are the white collar and cuffs. The same female model is shown wearing the same clothes in a study for The Bourgeois Salon of 1880 (Galerie Ronny Van De Velde, Antwerp). There appears to be another clothing draped over the back of the chair. The chair seems to be a simple dining chair placed on top of a plain, rectangular wooden box. This same box appears elsewhere in various figure studies made in the studio by Ensor and Willy Finch.¹ A large charcoal and black chalk drawing from a private collection shows the same model in profile in exactly the same costume and pose. In this case, the artist – who may have been either Ensor or Willy Finch – was seated a little further to the left. The wooden box upon which the chair is placed is easier to make out in the drawing than in the painting. In the drawing, the young woman is shown with a bonnet on her head. It is clear to the naked eye that this white bonnet was overpainted in the painting. This observation was confirmed by the x-ray images made for research purposes.²

The young woman is Ensor’s younger sister Marie or Mitche (1861-1945) who frequently posed for her brother in the years 1880-85. We can find her distinctive mouth and the long bangs on her forehead in The Colourist (1881), The Oyster Eater (1882) and the lost painting, Haunted Furniture (1885 and 1888/90).

Dorine Cardijn posited that the artist painted the woman outdoors, but the background and foreground are represented so loosely that it is impossible to determine whether the young woman is shown indoors or out.³

In 1892, Ensor’s close friend, Eugène Demolder, commented upon a series of coquettes in Ensor’s work. This painting belongs to this series of young, and occasionally older, bourgeois women in various situations.⁴

The style of the painting is sketchy and the fore- and background are particularly loosely painted. The hands and white collar and cuffs of the blouse are also depicted in a very sketchy way. Here and there, the use of a palette knife also strikes the eye. This painting has a very different look to that of Girl with the Upturned Nose (1879), but the differences are less pronounced if we compare the faces in these two paintings. Ensor accentuated certain facial features in Lady with Red Parasol with a few fine, black brushstrokes. The entire composition is dominated by the bright red of the jacket and the more or less bright red area of the open parasol. The young woman's face stands out against this large, irregular red surface. Ensor must have painted over the white bonnet on her head so as not to disrupt this image.

Ensor dated this painting 1881 in the handwritten Liste de mes Oeuvres (List of my works) that he sent to Verhaeren in 1908 and Le Roy in 1922, the same year as Study for a Bourgeois Salon. Haesaerts dated the painting 1882.⁵ The technical study of the painting revealed that Ensor added his signature and the date to a dry paint layer. However, we do not know when he did this. It is not possible to date the work with greater precision on the basis of stylistic or technical observations. In the Liste de mes oeuvres, Ensor calls the painting Lady in Red, reminiscent of the titles that James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) gave to his works. Was Ensor already aware of his innovatory role as early as 1880-1882, or did he feel a need to emphasise this in any way possible after 1900?

Technical research has revealed a composition beneath the Lady with Red Parasol. The composition was partially reconstructed and shows a scene from the American War of Independence (1775-83). A medal honouring revolutionary war hero, General Daniel Morgan, had been reproduced in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and copied by Ensor in a sketchbook. We do not know whether Ensor later worked up this black-and-white drawing into an oil painting on his own initiative, or whether he did this as a studio exercise at the Brussels art academy.

Ensor first exhibited Lady with Red Parasol at Le Sillon in Brussels. Fellow artist, Adolphe Crespin (1859-1944), probably acquired it shortly thereafter. Crespin was a poster artist and a master of Art Nouveau sgraffito on the facades numerous Brussels bourgeois houses.

Dorine Cardijn, La dame au parasol rouge, Lydia Schoonbaert (ed.), James Ensor. Paris-Musées, 1990.
Xavier Tricot, James Ensor. Leven en werk. Oeuvrecatalogus van de schilderijen, Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009, nr. 165.
Herwig Todts, James Ensor, Occasional Modernist. Ensor’s Artistic and Social Ideas and the Interpretation of his Art, (XIX Studies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture), Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.

Lady with Red Parasol is painted on a regular, even-weave, commercially made canvas. It has lost its tacking margins during a restoration intervention. The canvas is lined with wax resin hiding any stamps or inscriptions that may be present beneath.

There is a white, lead-based ground layer on the canvas but this is not visible to the naked eye anywhere, as it is entirely covered by paint layers. Ensor painted Lady with Red Parasol on top of another composition that is visible on x-ray. There exists a sketch of the underlying composition that Ensor made after an etching by Jules Jaquemart of a medal by Morgan Dupré. The MA-XRF scans only show a small detail of the underlying image in the mercury image: the torso and hat of the fallen soldier. The infrared image reveals no carbon-based underdrawing.

Both compositions were painted in oil paint and the underlying composition appears to still be visible in a few places through the paint layer above. Ensor rotated the painting a quarter turn before painting the Lady with Red Parasol. He began by setting out a rough sketch of the composition in black paint. He applied his paint with both coarse-bristled, and finer, softer brushes, as well as a palette knife. He initially painted a white bonnet on the lady’s head. He subsequently overpainted this bonnet with a thin layer of brown paint to turn it into the woman’s hair.

The pigments Ensor used were vermilion, earth pigments, cobalt blue and ultramarine and/or Prussian blue, chrome yellow and possibly chrome green. The presence of manganese in some of the earth pigments may indicate Sienna or umber.

The painting is signed in red paint at lower right Ensor 80 on top of an already dry paint layer.
The varnish layer is thick and its application is uneven. White crystalline specks are visible across the entire surface of the painting. It is not clear whether these are contained within the varnish layer or have arisen out of the paint layer.

Georges Giroux Collection, Brussels; A. Crespin Collection, Brussels; bought at auction by Galerie Georges Giroux, Brussels, 1930, lot no. 48.

1963: restoration by Frederik Bender.
27/08/1999 condition report and handling report by Ineke Labarque: condition report for museum loan, dusting of front and back of painting and removal of grime between canvas and stretcher. Repair of scratches in varnish with brush and dammar varnish. Addition of watercolour retouche to black chairback. Consolidation of loose parts of the frame with Mowilith DMC2, replacing and fixing stretcher keys. Addition of watercolour retouches to frame where white plaster was visible. Colouring of brown paper edges protruding from rebate with watercolour; addition of felt and balsa wood slats to rebate; addition of protection to back of work.
4/09/2003: conservation report and condition report by Gwen Borms. Surface cleaning, small retouches to the frame and checking of paint layer.

1909, Brussels, Musée Moderne, Le Sillon. XVIme Salon annuel, no. 33;
1929, Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts, James Ensor, no. 140;
1939, Parjs, La Gazette des Beaux-Arts et Beaux-Arts, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Ensor, no. 17;
1950, Bosvoorde, Salons van 't Hoog Huis, 5th Exhibition, no. 10;
1951, Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, James Ensor. Retrospective, no. 19, image no. 16;
1956, Breda, Cultureel Centrum Beyerd, Confrontatie Noord / Zuid, no. 28;
1956/ 1957, Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Belgian Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Van Meunier to Permeke;
1959, Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, James Ensor (no catalogue);
1961, Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum, Ensor. 1860/1949, no. 9, image;
1961, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Ensor. 1860/1949, no. 9, image;
1970, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, En liten bok om Ensor, no. 8;
1983, Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, James Ensor, no. 28;
1989, Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, James Ensor. Belgien um 1900, no. 5, image p. 67;
1990, Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, James Ensor, no. 14, image p. 95;
1993/ 1994, Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, In depot / uit depot. De modernen in het koninklijk museum;
1999/ 2000, Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Ensor, no. 24, image p. 87;
2003, Saint Petersburg, Russian Ethnographic Museum, James Ensor (1860-1949). Antwerp presents a Painter, no. 4, image;
2010, Mexico, Xochimilco, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patinõ, James Ensor, image p. 45;
2010/ 2011, Brussels, ING Cultural Center, Ensor Unmasked, no. 116, image p. 108;
2011, The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, James Ensor. Universum van een fantast, image p. 91;
2012, Aichi, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, James Ensor in Context. Ensor and the History of European Art from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, no. 81, image p. 096;
2012, Ehime, The Museum of Art, James Ensor in Context. Ensor and the History of European Art from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, no. 81, image p. 096;
2012, Tokyo, Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum of Art, James Ensor in Context. Ensor and the History of European Art from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, no. 81, image p. 096;
2012/ 2013, Iwate, Iwate Museum of Art, James Ensor in Context. Ensor and the History of European Art from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, no. 81, image p. 096;
2013, Okayama, The Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, James Ensor in Context. Ensor and the History of European Art from the Collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, no. 81, image p. 096;
2013/ 2014, Ordrupgaard, James Ensor Fra Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen og schweiziske samlinger, no. 11, image;
2014, Basel, Kunstmuseum, Die überraschten Masken: James Ensor aus dem Königlichen Museum für Schöne Künste Antwerpen und Schweizer Sammlungen, no 11, image;
2014, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Getty Center, The Scandalous Art of James Ensor (no catalogue);
2014/ 2015, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor (no catalogue);
2018/ 2020, Ostend, Mu.ZEE, Dreams of Mother-of-Pearl. De ENSOR-verzameling van het KMSKA in Oostende, image p. 55;