The Fight

By 1925 Ensor was in his sixties and an honoured man in Ostend, decades past the ferocious pictures that had made his name. This late canvas turns to something small: two men locked in a street brawl, one lunging in greenish blue, an older man reeling back in vivid red. The paint around them thins to a pale, sketchy ground, and a few faces lean from upstairs windows to watch, the way a real quarrel draws a neighbourhood to its shutters. He keeps the drawing loose and the colour loud, so the scuffle feels closer to seaside theatre than to real danger. There are no masks here and no skeletons, just people caught mid-shove in a moment that will be over in seconds.