The Ray

James Ensor spent almost his whole life in the seaside town of Ostend, living above his family's curiosity shop, and by 1892 he was known for crowded paintings of masks and skeletons rather than anything as still as a fish. Yet here is a fish. A skate hangs gutted and pale on a table, its flat body seeming almost to grin at you. Ensor was answering a picture he admired, Chardin's ray of the 1720s, long treated by French painters as a test of pure painting. He keeps the humble subject and loads it with thick, shimmering colour, the flesh worked into pinks and greens that belong to no real fish. The panel now hangs in Brussels, among the fin-de-siecle rooms of Belgium's national collection.