The Intrigue (Ensor)

James Ensor spent his life in the seaside town of Ostend, living above the family shop that sold seashells, chinoiserie and carnival masks to summer visitors. Those masks climbed into his paintings and never left. The Intrigue, from 1890, packs a jostling crowd of them together, grinning and leering, and the scene is closer to home than it looks. It is widely read as Ensor's sour comment on the marriage of his sister to a dealer from Berlin, a match that set the town's tongues wagging. He painted the gossips as a mob of masked carnival-goers of the kind that filled Ostend's streets each winter. He liked the picture enough to make a second version two decades later, now in Minneapolis.