The Baths at Ostend

By 1890 Ostend was Belgium's grand seaside resort, the summer haunt of King Leopold the Second and of the moneyed crowds the railway now poured onto its beach. James Ensor lived there year round, above his family's souvenir shop, and he watched these visitors with a cold eye. Here he packs the sand and the shallows with dozens of tiny figures in striped bathing costumes: couples pawing at each other, a stiff priest, a stray dog, bodies flailing in the surf in what a friend of his called a lunatic dance of fools. Look closely at the numbered bathing huts and the jokes turn coarser, some too rude to spell out. The whole thing has the air of a carnival, respectable people caught behaving badly. Audiences of the time found it genuinely shocking, and the story goes that at one showing in Brussels it was taken down from the wall.