About this work
*The Assassination* is an oil on canvas that offers no comfortable entry point. The scene shows a man being killed, surrounded by four figures pressing directly over him, while musicians and onlookers populate the periphery.
The viewer is positioned as if on the opposite wall — watching the act unfold, complicit by proximity, mirroring the crowd on the other side.
Spectators spill from the windows above, as though they've arrived just in time for front-row seats. The canvas seethes with Ensor's signature morbid energy: bodies press and contort, colour is used not to beautify but to agitate, and the grotesque and the mundane sit shoulder to shoulder in a space that feels both theatrical and deeply unnerving. One figure at the victim's feet has dolphin fins for hands — a reminder that Ensor's visual logic follows its own internal rules, stranger than nightmare and stranger than satire.
Painted in 1890 and measuring 60.5 × 77.2 cm,
the work is held at the Columbus Museum of Art in the United States.
It is based on Edgar Allan Poe's gothic tale *The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar* (1845), which tells the gruesome story of a hypnotist trying to arrest the process of death by hypnotising a dying man.
The four figures doing the tormenting are identified as the same four Persian physicians — Iston, Pouffamatus, Cracozie, and Transmouffe — who appear in another Ensor work, suggesting a recurring cast of grotesques that Ensor developed across his practice like characters in a private theatre. The painting itself is based on earlier etchings of the same composition,
including a coloured etching at MoMA and a zinc etching at the Art Institute of Chicago — versions that depict the same scene without the crowd of onlookers. The addition of spectators in the oil painting transforms the subject: what was originally a scene of violation becomes, in the final canvas, an indictment of those who watch.
This is a painting for a particular kind of room and a particular kind of owner — someone unafraid of darkness on the wall, drawn to work that argues rather than decorates. It holds its own in a space with strong architectural character: a high-ceilinged studio, a library with deep shelves, a hallway that warrants a second glance. Against a dark or neutral wall, the painting's acid palette and churning composition assert themselves without shouting. It's the sort of work that rewards sustained looking — the longer you stay, the more the crowd implicates you, until the viewer and the spectators inside the frame are, uncomfortably, one and the same.
