Blue Flask and Chicken

By 1925, James Ensor was 65 and long past the work that had made his name. The masked crowds and skeletons of his wild 1880s were decades behind him, and new paintings came slowly now. What he turned to instead was the still life, a genre he painted again and again in his later years. Here the subject is about as old as still life itself: a dead chicken laid on a table beside a tall blue glass flask. Objects like these ran in the family. Ensor grew up over his parents' souvenir and curiosity shop in the seaside town of Ostend, crowded with shells, porcelain and chinoiserie, and that shopkeeper's eye for an odd, colourful thing never left him. The picture is small, a little over half a metre across, and signed at the lower left.