Skeletons in Fancy Dress

1898 was the year Paris finally looked at Ensor. The magazine La Plume gave him a special issue, with texts by writers including Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, and put his work on show in the city. He was 38 and still working in the attic of the family house in Ostend, above the shop his mother's relatives ran, which sold shells, chinoiserie and carnival masks to summer visitors on the Belgian coast.

That stock had been feeding his pictures for years. This one is small, about 35 centimetres on its longest side, and shows skeletons got up in costume, a joke he had been making since the 1880s. He signed it at the lower left, J. Ensor, 98. Ostend held the first of its Dead Rat Balls, a masked winter ball named after a Montmartre cafe, in that same year.