James Ensor, coloured pencils on paper, "Napoléon". Signed Ensor bottom right. Unframed. Dimensions, 8.75" x 5.25". Provenance: The Joseph Liverant Estate, Ottawa, Canada. A major figure of the Belgian avant-garde in the late 19th century and a forerunner of 20th-century Expressionism, James Ensor produced paintings that explored religious subject matter, political satire, and carnivalesque imagery (his family owned an antiques and souvenir emporium that sold grotesque carnival masks). In his early years. Ensor was a founder and leader of Les Vingt (The Twenty), a group whose goal was to promote new artistic developments in Europe, though they later rejected his work as it became more radical and extreme in subject and method. Ensor admired the works of Francisco Goya and J. M. W. Turner, and felt a particular affinity with their preoccupations with both light and violence.