Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - The Artist's Mother and Sister

Preview image of work. graphite on paper, The Artist's Mother and Sister 5620

1963.485

Recommend keywords

Help us make our collections more accessible by providing keywords to describe this artwork. The BCMA uses the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus to provide consistent keywords. Enter a keyword in the field below and you will be prompted with a list of possible matching AAT preferred terms.

The Artist's Mother and Sister

Export record as: Plain text | JSON | CDWA-Lite | VRA Core 4

Artist

James Ensor (1860 - 1949)

Title

The Artist's Mother and Sister

Creation Date

1860-1949

Century

19th-20th century

Dimensions

8 in. x 9 5/8 in. (20.3 cm. x 24.5 cm.)

Object Type

drawing

Creation Place

Europe, Belgium

Medium and Support

graphite on paper

Credit Line

Museum Purchase

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

1963.485

The Belgian artist James Ensor, who lived with his family and maintained a studio in the attic of the family home in Ostend until December 1885, sketched the faces of his mother Maria Catharina Haeghman and sister Mitche in a surprising range of expressions. While the animated, Delacroix-worthy lines of his most elaborate sketch show his mother intensely focused on her needlework, a second, abbreviated one has her head sinking to the side, perhaps dozing off. Mitche’s face, with wide-open eyes that don’t seem to see but daydream, is lightly drawn into the upper right corner. At the lower left, in miniature format, the mother’s figure appears again in profile, sitting not in a chair, but sheltered by an ornamental flowering plant. Ensor rejected academic tradition in favor of an intensely subjective, fantastical, and at times satirical art. This sheet demonstrates how his pencil could turn observations of daily life into personal visions.