In the 1923 painting Still-Life with Sea Shells, the eccentric Belgian artist James Ensor assembled a Japanese fan, teacup, and saucer along with rare shells as a group of curiosities—the sort of things one might have found in his parents’ coastal tourist shop. Displayed beneath the lightly sketched figure of a nude in the upper-right corner, the objects recall the northern tradition of symbolically laden still-lifes and the eighteenth-century taste for chinoiserie, as well as the newly emerged Surrealist habit of searching through flea markets and antique stores for compelling oddities, often with psychosexual overtones.

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