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Meet the artist who turned his family's mask shop into a house of surreal horrors

Popkin
Aug 11, 2025
∙ Paid

James Ensor, The Deadly Sins (ca. 1904) — The Public Domain Review

James Ensor (1860–1949) spent nearly his entire life in Ostend, Belgium, living above the family shop that sold carnival masks. In the 1880s he turned his back on the realist style that had first brought him recognition and began conjuring a far stranger world: grotesque Christian icons, …

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