James Ensor, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, 1887

by Atelier Liesjes

Above a flat, green landscape, a figure hovers in a cloud of light. She is pink and orange, half-human, with outstretched arms and legs that seem to be swimming through space; behind her, a fan of white rays and a radiant disc unfold, like a sun or a halo. A pale rainbow curls away from the top left to the right and dissolves into the pearly-white sky, which is tinged with pink, lilac and pale blue. Beneath this heavenly scene lies a narrow strip of land: a green meadow, a cluster of dark trees, and in the foreground, marshy, brownish-purple ground with a channel of water. In the bottom right, two small, naked figures are running away through the tall grass, their flesh a pale pink, their backs bent; a third figure flees further towards the edge. Ensor recounts the biblical story of the expulsion from paradise, but he does not do so with the classic angel bearing a flaming sword. In his version, the messenger is a swirling being of light that is itself on the verge of dissolving, and the Garden of Eden is an ordinary, flat polder landscape. The colours are soft and pastel-like, the paint is thin and transparent, and the atmosphere is more dreamlike than dramatic. Herein lies Ensor’s symbolist side: the sacred is represented as light, and humankind remains a tiny, insignificant figure in the distance. Rarely did he take the Bible as literally as he does here. James Ensor (Ostend 1860 – Ostend 1949) studied at the Brussels Academy and co-founded the group Les XX in 1883. He became world-famous for his masks, skeletons and the Entry of Christ into Brussels, but he also painted seascapes, still lifes and religious scenes such as this one. A rare, delicate work from his early Symbolist period, for a collector of Belgian modern art.