James Ensor is the most important Belgian painter after Rubens, and this is the house where he lived for most of his life — from 1876 until his death in 1949. The ground floor was a shell and souvenir shop run by his family; the upper floors were his studio and living quarters. Both are preserved essentially as he left them, with his paintings, personal effects, and the actual masks and shells that appear in his work.
Ensor's paintings prefigured Expressionism and Surrealism, but he spent his entire career in Ostend and was largely ignored by the art world until near the end of his life. The house explains a great deal about where his strange, unsettling imagery came from. Open Tuesday to Sunday; combined tickets available with the MuZee museum.