ANTWERP.- Tim Van Laere Books has presented James Ensor: A Portrait of the Old Master as a Young Man, a new publication dedicated to one of Belgium’s most inventive and elusive artists. Released in connection with the James Ensor presentation at Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp, the book accompanied the exhibition held from March 12 through May 16, 2026.

With a text by Herwig Todts, the volume looks beyond the familiar image of Ensor as the painter of masks, skeletons and carnivalesque satire, focusing instead on the artist’s later years as a period of continued experimentation. Rather than treating Ensor’s career as a neat progression from early realism to Symbolist breakthrough and late reflection, the book argues for a more complicated artist—one who resisted fixed categories and continued to shift between styles, subjects and techniques well into old age.

The publication opens from a poignant biographical moment. In 1918, after the First World War, Ensor wrote to his sister Mitche, recalling his appearance before a German court-martial in 1915, the death of his mother, and the loss of his aunt Mimi. After the death of his uncle Leopold Haegheman, Ensor left the large family house where he had lived alone and moved into the home that would later become known as the Ensor House. There, he arranged a room filled with a piano, harmonium, writing table, easel, props and walls crowded with drawings, prints and paintings.

From this setting, the book presents an artist still driven by curiosity. Ensor continued to explore light, color, music, theatricality and chance, moving between ethereal marine scenes, strange still lifes, religious subjects, carnival figures and experimental drawings. Works such as La tentation de Saint-Antoine, Les Gillettes, La Naissance de Vénus and Le Christ agonisant show an artist who could dissolve figures into luminous mist or push color toward theatrical intensity.

Color becomes one of the publication’s central threads. Ensor described color almost as a living force, a rebellious world of personalities and tensions. His late works often suggest that color itself—not narrative or subject matter—is the real protagonist. A red cabbage, a pink cross, cadmium yellow, vermilion and lead white become part of a painterly drama in which Ensor’s imagination remains sharp, comic and unpredictable.

The book also highlights Ensor’s deep relationship with music. He played piano, admired Wagner, composed his own pieces and developed music for the ballet La Gamme d’amour. For Ensor, painting could behave like music: autonomous, rhythmic and capable of speaking beyond literal description.

Among the most intriguing sections is the discussion of Ensor’s so-called Opalines, experimental works made from failed prints that he transformed with colored pencil, ink, gouache and watercolor. Rather than hiding accidents, Ensor used them as starting points, allowing stains, shadows and incomplete impressions to suggest monsters, saints, ballerinas, cupids and strange hybrid figures.

The volume ultimately portrays Ensor as an artist who never accepted routine. Even in his final decades, he remained open to risk, humor and discovery. In Marine, soleil couchant of 1940, the book identifies the modernist force of an artist who helped free painting from its traditional illustrative role. Ensor, it suggests, was not simply an old master looking back, but a young spirit still testing what painting could become.

Published by Tim Van Laere Books, James Ensor: A Portrait of the Old Master as a Young Man includes texts by Herwig Todts and Tom Van Laere, photography by Tim Van Laere Gallery and Pieter Huybrechts, and carries the ISBN 978-9-46400-441-0.