Christie’s announces sale of James Ensor Prints from Mira Jacob collection

KOLKATA: Christie’s is pleased to announce the sale of James Ensor Prints: The Mira Jacob Collection, which will be offered on Wednesday, 19 March in London. This remarkable collection is one of the most comprehensive groups of the artist’s graphic oeuvre in private hands, comprising 161 works dating from 1886 through to 1931. Included are many hand-coloured proofs, some great rarities and all of the artist’s most important printed subjects. The collection was carefully put together by the Parisian gallerist and collector Mira Jacob, one of the great champions of surrealist art, and provides a unique insight into the salient themes of Ensor’s art, ranging from delightfully quiet landscapes to scathing satire, and from symbolist nightmares populated by skeletons and ghouls, angels and demons, to scenes from the life of Christ.

Murray Macaulay, head of sale, London, comments in an email statement: "Fantastical, macabre, subversive - the art of James Ensor is as startling today as it was to his contemporaries. Drawing on the satirical tradition of Bosch and Brueghel, and inspired by the ‘gothic’ literature of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ensor’s grotesque, often darkly comical fantasies lambasted the status quo and exposed the unsavoury side of human nature. Guillermo Del Toro and Tim Burton. The Mira Jacob Collection of James Ensor Prints celebrates Ensor as an artist and printmaker whose oeuvre is as quirky and personal as it is universal."