Under the Shadow of Masks

By 1925 Ensor was 65 and had become a figure Belgium honoured rather than argued about. The pictures that had scandalised people were nearly 40 years behind him, and in his later decades he mostly returned to subjects he had already made his own. Masks were the chief one. He grew up among them in Ostend, in the shop where his family sold souvenirs, shells and carnival masks to summer visitors.

Here the masked figures sit at the edge of a table and inspect what has been laid out on it: vases of flowers, lengths of fabric, a pair of small statues. On the wall behind them, winged shapes and grotesque faces are barely drawn in.

The painting reached Finland privately. A Belgian businessman, Camille Snauwaert, gave it to the Helsinki collector Jalo Sihtola in 1937, the year Sihtola called on Ensor and described him in a letter as an intelligent artist and a great old gentleman. It hangs in the Ateneum today as part of the Ester and Jalo Sihtola donation.