Thrift store finds real James Ensor and donates masterpiece to museum
A remarkable story in the margin from Antwerp, because there an employee of the local thrift shop 'Kringwinkel' suddenly found an etching by none other than James Ensor among the items brought in.
An employee of the Kringwinkel in Merksem was going through some items donated to the store in September and suddenly came across a striking work of art. Having recently visited James Ensor's museum in Ostend herself, she thought the resemblance to the work brought into the secondhand shop was striking. After contacting auction house Bernaerts and experts at KMSKA, it indeed turned out to be a print of Le Meuble Hanté or The Enchanted Furniture from 1888. Kringwinkel Antwerpen has decided to donate the work to the KMSKA. The value of the etching is estimated between 1,000 and 6,000 euros.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who exerted an important influence on expressionism and surrealism and lived most of his life in Ostend. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
(FVDV for Tagtik/Source: Het Nieuwsblad/Illustration: James Ensor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)