About this work
The first thing the eye registers in *Icon* is a face — Ensor presents his friend face-on, like a saint raising his hand in benediction. That figure is Eugène Demolder, writer and art critic, rendered at the base of a narrow vertical panel in the format and gravity of a devotional object. This panel by James Ensor resembles a triptych, but in a vertical format.
Behind the figure of Demolder, blue, waving motifs perhaps symbolise the River Jordan, and at the bottom left and right, two seething devils appear, one of whom is spitting. Above this earthly zone, the composition ascends into the sacred: in the middle section, scenes from Christ's Passion appear, and in the uppermost register, Ensor gives a reasonably accurate copy of Stefan Lochner's masterpiece *Madonna with Child in the Rose Garden* (c. 1440, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne).
Demolder adored rich textures and beautiful colours — look at the sparkling accents of colour on this panel. The palette is insistently jewel-like, pressing warmth and shimmer into what is, structurally, a small work: 36 × 21 cm, in oil, pencil and gouache on panel, signed and dated lower right: ENSOR/93.
In 1893, Ensor painted the Portrait of Eugène Demolder, which he exhibited at the salon of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels in 1894 with the title: *Icône*. The moment was charged. In 1893 Ensor had fruitlessly set himself against the dissolution of the art circle Les Vingt, and it was at Rousseau's house that Ensor had befriended Demolder, who would become one of his biggest supporters, as well as other local intellectuals, artists, and free thinkers.
In 1894 Ensor mounted his first one-man show in Brussels, thanks to support from his friend Eugène Demolder, the author of an 1892 book about Ensor.
His friend, the art critic and writer Eugène Demolder (1862–1919), is depicted as a saint, flanked by two spewing devils — a saint who could well be Saint John the Baptist, heralding the coming of James Ensor as the Messiah of Belgian painting. The title itself is layered:
