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Lot Essay
Ensor’s La Vengeance de Hop-Frog (Hop-Frog’s Revenge) illustrates the climactic final scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s gruesome tale of the same title. Hop-Frog is a court jester so named for his limp and dwarfism, who takes revenge on a cruel king and his advisors for humiliating both himself and his friend, the female dwarf Tripetta. In Poe’s story, Hop-Frog persuades the king and his ministers to attend a masquerade dressed as 'Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs' with costumes made of flax and soaked in tar. During the ball, Hop-Frog chains them to a lowered chandelier, hoists them into the air, and sets them ablaze: 'pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat…which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below, horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest assistance' (quoted from: J. G. Kennedy (ed.), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, London, 2006, p. 223).
Ensor captures this horrific moment in his etching, showing Hop-Frog clinging to the chandelier, torch extended toward the burning figures below. In the present second, final state of the print, a scorched skeleton lies on the floor - a grisly detail absent in the first state.
Ensor’s lively hand-colouring is a distinctive aspect of his printmaking practice; in the present impression the vivid red of the charred bodies surrounded by billowing yellow flames heighten the sense of horror, while the variety of colours in the costumes of the spectators in the foreground brings a jewel-like intensity to the work. Ensor reserved this work-intensive technique for prints he considered his finest works - La Vengeance de Hop-Frog and Les Péchés Capitaux ('The Seven Deadly Sins'; see lot 328) being key examples - and his hand-coloured etchings are hence quite rare.
Ensor was deeply drawn to Poe's tale, first depicting it in a rare lithograph dated circa 1888-1891, where the image is in reverse to the etched version of 1896. He revisited the composition in an oil painting (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) in the same direction as the lithograph dated 1896, although Paul Haesaerts believed this to be back-dated and more likely to have been painted around 1910 (Haesaerts, 1957, p. 224). Ensor frequently back-dated works and always inscribed his prints with the date of the plate’s creation rather than the date the print was pulled. This method allowed him to revisit his favourite etchings across several decades and to print them on demand over the course of his career.
As Elesh insightfully observed, 'It is a story that deals with an affront to human dignity, of outrage and revenge… Ensor, continually attacked by his critics, isolated by his own genius, must have felt great sympathy for the Hop Frog character' (Elesh, 1982, p. 66). Indeed, themes of resentment, injustice, abuse of power, and the grotesque permeate Ensor’s art. His inspirations came from literary sources but also from the visual arts of different periods, including Jacques Callot, Pieter Bruegel, Francisco de Goya, and English satirists like George ‘Moutard’ Woodward and Thomas Rowlandson.
Poe’s tale itself may have been drawn from an historical event: at court festivities held at the French royal palace of Saint-Pol in 1393 , which became infamous as the Bal des Ardents ('Ball of the Burning Men'), King Charles VI and his courtiers were accidentally set alight in flammable costumes by the King’s brother. In the real-life event, however, the King survived unscathed. Both Poe and Ensor would have been fascinated by how the event exposed royal decadence and eroded public confidence in the monarchy. In Hop-Frog’s Revenge, Ensor channels this historic outrage into a nightmarish spectacle of justice served, aligning his own artistic subversion with the defiant act of the vengeful jester.
Ensor captures this horrific moment in his etching, showing Hop-Frog clinging to the chandelier, torch extended toward the burning figures below. In the present second, final state of the print, a scorched skeleton lies on the floor - a grisly detail absent in the first state.
Ensor’s lively hand-colouring is a distinctive aspect of his printmaking practice; in the present impression the vivid red of the charred bodies surrounded by billowing yellow flames heighten the sense of horror, while the variety of colours in the costumes of the spectators in the foreground brings a jewel-like intensity to the work. Ensor reserved this work-intensive technique for prints he considered his finest works - La Vengeance de Hop-Frog and Les Péchés Capitaux ('The Seven Deadly Sins'; see lot 328) being key examples - and his hand-coloured etchings are hence quite rare.
Ensor was deeply drawn to Poe's tale, first depicting it in a rare lithograph dated circa 1888-1891, where the image is in reverse to the etched version of 1896. He revisited the composition in an oil painting (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) in the same direction as the lithograph dated 1896, although Paul Haesaerts believed this to be back-dated and more likely to have been painted around 1910 (Haesaerts, 1957, p. 224). Ensor frequently back-dated works and always inscribed his prints with the date of the plate’s creation rather than the date the print was pulled. This method allowed him to revisit his favourite etchings across several decades and to print them on demand over the course of his career.
As Elesh insightfully observed, 'It is a story that deals with an affront to human dignity, of outrage and revenge… Ensor, continually attacked by his critics, isolated by his own genius, must have felt great sympathy for the Hop Frog character' (Elesh, 1982, p. 66). Indeed, themes of resentment, injustice, abuse of power, and the grotesque permeate Ensor’s art. His inspirations came from literary sources but also from the visual arts of different periods, including Jacques Callot, Pieter Bruegel, Francisco de Goya, and English satirists like George ‘Moutard’ Woodward and Thomas Rowlandson.
Poe’s tale itself may have been drawn from an historical event: at court festivities held at the French royal palace of Saint-Pol in 1393 , which became infamous as the Bal des Ardents ('Ball of the Burning Men'), King Charles VI and his courtiers were accidentally set alight in flammable costumes by the King’s brother. In the real-life event, however, the King survived unscathed. Both Poe and Ensor would have been fascinated by how the event exposed royal decadence and eroded public confidence in the monarchy. In Hop-Frog’s Revenge, Ensor channels this historic outrage into a nightmarish spectacle of justice served, aligning his own artistic subversion with the defiant act of the vengeful jester.