The Seven Deadly Sins Under Death’s Dominion by James Ensor, 1904

“…the eternal black night, death under the colourless earth”

– James Ensor on his dread of death

 

 

Belgian painter and printmaker James Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) etched his Seven Deadly Sins in 1904. To hammer home the message of human foolishness, malice and the farce we construct around ourselves, he created a further image showing all the excited and energetic sins gathered beneath death’s embrace. As was his style, Ensor’s death is visualised as an animated skeleton delivering a derisive grin to the living.

For Ensor, death was an ever-present, shortening the distance between joy and grief. In a print made when he was 28, he depicted himself as a rotting corpse, as he imagined he would be in 1960.

 

During the late 19th century, the knowing rejected much of Ensor’s work as scandalous, particularly his painting Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (1888–89). The Belgian art critic Octave Maus famously summed up the response from art critics to Ensor’s innovative and defiant work:

“Ensor is the leader of a clan. Ensor is the limelight. Ensor sums up and concentrates certain principles which are considered to be anarchistic. In short, Ensor is a dangerous person who has great changes. … He is consequently marked for blows. It is at him that all the harquebuses are aimed. It is on his head that are dumped the most aromatic containers of the so-called serious critics.”[citation needed] Some of Ensor’s contemporaneous work reveals his defiant response to this criticism. For example, the 1887 etching “Le Pisseur” depicts the artist urinating on a graffitied wall declaring (in the voice of an art critic) “Ensor est un fou” or “Ensor is a Madman.”

 

His strange and theatrical work seen in paintings such as Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring and Scandalized Masks features figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold among the “bizarre skeletons, monsters and marine plants” in his mother’s gift shop during Ostend’s annual Carnival. Ensor wanted to get beneath the skin of humanity, and much like Jose Posada’s Calaveras and Hugo Simberg’s depictions of death, he showed us our bones, dressing skeletons in his studio.

 

As well as panting, Ensor was a prolific and accomplished printmaker. He created 133 etchings and drypoints over the course of his career, recognising their durability and ability to be recreated over painting, writing: “Thoughts of survival frighten me. The transitoriness of the painting material gives me cause for worry.”

In a letter to Albert Croquez in 1934, Ensor enlarged on his desire to live on: “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.”

 

The seven deadly sins (also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins) function as a grouping classification of major vices within the teachings of Christianity. According to the standard list, the seven deadly sins in Roman Catholic Church are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

 

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Lead image: Death Dominating the Deadly Sins by James Ensor-1904