The Temptation of Saint Anthony

James Ensors The Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1887 is a monumental drawing on 51 joined sheets of paper that depicts the hermit saint beset by the demonic temptations that have fascinated artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dali, rendered with the obsessive detail and grotesque invention that make Ensor one of the most distinctive figures in the history of art. The sheer scale of the work, assembled from 51 sheets of paper that were cut and pasted together to create a surface large enough to accommodate the teeming horde of demons, monsters, and grotesque figures that torment the saint, is itself a demonstration of Ensors ambition and the compulsion that drove him to fill every available inch of pictorial space with fantastical imagery. The mixed media technique, colored pencils, scraping, graphite, charcoal, Conte crayon, colored chalk, and watercolor, all selectively fixed, reveals a working process of extraordinary complexity in which Ensor combined virtually every drawing medium available to him in a single work, adding and revising over an extended period. The scraping and cut-and-paste elements indicate that Ensor reworked the composition by physically removing sections and replacing them with new ones, a process that gives the work its palimpsestic quality. The temptation of Saint Anthony, a subject with a long tradition in Northern European art from Bosch through Matthias Grunewald, provided Ensor with a pretext for the fantastic and grotesque imagery that he had been developing since the mid-1880s, when his work began to depart from the Impressionist style of his early career toward the visionary and satirical art that would make him the leading Symbolist painter in Belgium.

Ensors Temptation of Saint Anthony is one of the most ambitious drawings of the 19th century and a key work in the Symbolist movement, demonstrating that drawing could be a medium of monumental expression equal to painting. Its influence on the development of fantastic and surrealist art in the 20th century extends from the Expressionists to the Surrealists, who recognized in Ensor a predecessor of their own exploration of the unconscious.

A monumental mixed-media drawing on 51 joined sheets by Ensor depicting Saint Anthony beset by demonic temptations with obsessive detail and grotesque invention, combining every available drawing medium in a palimpsestic reworking that stands as one of the most ambitious drawings of the 19th century.