Christ Shown to the People and Christ's Entry into Jerusalem
Artist / maker
James Ensor (draftsmen (artists))Date
ca. 1887Period
19th centuryCollection
Museum of Fine Arts Ghent
In this study, one of the most informal in his oeuvre, Ensor combined the representation of two drawings from the series "The Aureoles of Christ": on the left "Christ Shown to the people", on the right "Christ's entry into Jerusalem" (respectively Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1988-C and 1963-E). Despite the sketchy character of the drawing, most elements of…
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In this study, one of the most informal in his oeuvre, Ensor combined the representation of two drawings from the series "The Aureoles of Christ": on the left "Christ Shown to the people", on the right "Christ's entry into Jerusalem" (respectively Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1988-C and 1963-E). Despite the sketchy character of the drawing, most elements of the two large compositions can be recognised in it, for example, the architecture, the figures in the crowd and the head of the French politician and philosopher Emile Littré. The double sketch also shares the proportional distribution with the large drawings. From this one can deduce that the small study probably originated after the large drawings and not as a preliminary study. Ensor retained the general idea of the series "The Aureoles of Christ" - the nuclei of light in the midst of a lavish architecture and crowd - in a highly dynamic set of lines, curls and accents scattered loosely across the sheet. The two original scenes were integrated into a broadly conceived mass scene, thus forming a transition from the first, elaborate "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem", to the later painting, "Christ's Entry into Brussels", created in 1888 (Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum).
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