About this work
The research reveals that Ensor made several works with similar "My Portrait" titles. The most likely candidate for the product titled simply *"My Portrait"* — given its prevalence as a print and art reproduction — is the **1899 oil painting also known as *My Portrait Surrounded by Masks* (Mon portrait, entouré de masques)**, also referred to as *Self-Portrait with Masks*. Here is the grounded product description:
The canvas is dense with faces, and only one of them is real. Ensor places himself at the center of a carnival throng, visible from the head up, the bodies of the surrounding figures blocked entirely by an agglomeration of weird and unsettling faces.
Near the center is the artist himself — looking a little apprehensive, but emphatically human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters, and skulls that hem him in on all sides. The palette is riotous: acid yellows, hot reds, dead whites, and bruised purples crowd every corner of the composition, while Ensor's own face — calm, almost resigned — anchors the chaos at the center. The paintings live from the contrast of cheerful colours and disturbing forms.
*Self-Portrait with Masks* dates to 1899 , arriving at the tail end of Ensor's most furiously creative decade. Rubens' famous hatted self-portrait of 1623–24 has been often mentioned as a prototype for this work. By this point, the masks that had filled his parents' Ostend souvenir shop since childhood had become the central language of his art — he had written to a friend about receiving hundreds of weird masks from Germany, hanging them in his studio and noting that they expressed "all the enigmatic, obscurely mysterious, unpleasant, and strangely grotesque sides of life," and his work had exploded with an endless variety of false faces.
The crowd of masks chuckling as the artist poses is impossible not to read as symbolising the incomprehension that met his work — for Ensor, while the mask hides individual identity, it simultaneously exposes the wearer's true personality: malicious, giddy, foolish. The painting marked a moment of bitter irony: from around 1900, Ensor's output began to tail off just as he was achieving the public recognition that had long eluded him.
*My Portrait* is a work for rooms that can hold a confrontation. It doesn't recede into a wall — it stares back. Ensor once wrote that "reason and nature are the enemy of the artist," and true to his word, his paintings float free from traditional moorings, remaining unmistakable, always compelling, and often utterly mystifying. This is a painting for the viewer who is drawn to art that asks something of them — who finds the uncanny more
