Autumn Flowers

Ensor was 78 when he dated this 1938. He had spent 20 years by then in a house on the Vlaanderenstraat in Ostend, inherited from an uncle, with a curio shop on the ground floor of the kind his family had always kept, full of seashells, chinoiserie and carnival masks sold to summer visitors. Those masks had climbed into his paintings in the 1880s, into the leering crowds and skeletons that made his name, and by this date almost none of that is left in the work. He painted the sea, he painted fresh versions of his own early canvases, and he painted flowers, a great many of them. The king had made him a baron in 1929. He stayed in that house until his death in 1949, and it is open today as a museum of him.