James Ensor valuation

James Ensor (1860–1949) was born in Ostend, where the souvenir shop his mother and aunt ran sold curios and the carnival masks that later filled his pictures. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1877 to 1880, then returned to Ostend, where he lived and worked for almost his whole life, painting for years in the attic of his parents' house. With former classmates from the academy he founded the avant-garde group Les XX. From the mid-1880s his work turned to masks, skeletons and grotesque religious and satirical scenes, in paintings such as The Intrigue and Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He also made 133 prints, almost all etchings and drypoints, from Christ Mocked in 1886 to the series The Deadly Sins of around 1904. He was made a baron in 1929. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp holds the largest collection of his work, and there have been retrospectives at MoMA in New York in 2009 and the Royal Academy in London in 2016.

Besides the paintings there are drawings and a large body of etchings and drypoints, some printed on Japanese paper and some coloured by hand. For a print, note whether it is signed, what paper it is on and whether any colour is hand-applied, and check for foxing, fading and old tape. Drawings are fragile and fade in light, so how they have been framed and stored matters. Provenance records should go with the work.