Baron James Ensor, his bad angel, his coat of arms

In 1929 King Albert I made Ensor a baron. He was 69, and 40 years earlier his own country had barely tolerated him. His huge carnival canvas Christ's Entry into Brussels had been kept out of the exhibitions of the avant-garde group he helped found, and it stayed in his studio until that same year of 1929, when a Brussels retrospective finally put it in front of the public. Ensor designed a coat of arms to go with the title. This panel, roughly the size of a postcard, sets him beside those arms with the bad angel named in the title. He painted it in 1934, at 74, in the house on the Vlaanderenstraat in Ostend where he lived above the family souvenir shop full of carnival masks.