The Procession of the Penitents at Furnes

By 1913 James Ensor was past fifty and afraid of going blind, and he had turned away from the biting carnival scenes that made his name toward older religious subjects. Here he paints something his own corner of Belgium still did every year: the penitents' procession at Veurne, where hooded figures walk barefoot through the town behind a heavy cross. Ensor fills the street with the jostling, caricatured faces he could never quite put down, and sets Christ down among them in the foreground, hemmed in by the crowd rather than raised above it. The composition looks back to his huge Christ's Entry into Brussels of 1889. The Belgian collector Vittorio Cini gave the picture to the Vatican in 1973, where it hangs among modern religious art.