Self-Portrait with Masks

Self-Portrait with Masks, painted in 1937 and held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is among Ensor's last major statements on his most persistent theme: the relationship between the artist's true self and the carnival masks that surround and perhaps define it. By 1937, this subject had occupied him for more than fifty years — his breakthrough Self-Portrait with Masks dated from 1899 — and at eighty-seven he returned to it with the reflective authority of extreme old age. The Philadelphia canvas is a late summation of his lifelong investigation into identity, disguise, and the precariousness of the self among a world of masked performances. Ensor continued painting until very late in his long life, and this work testifies to the sustained creative energy that made him one of the most remarkable figures of European modernism.

Late Ensor self-portraits with masks organize the composition around the tension between the single unmasked face of the artist and the surrounding press of masked forms. His 1937 handling is looser and more gestural than the tight precision of his 1880s and 1890s work, but the compositional intelligence organizing the figure among the masks remains acute.