La raya

Ensor was 20 in 1880 and had just come home from the academy in Brussels, where he had spent three years quarrelling with his teachers. Home was Ostend, and he worked in the attic above his parents' shop, which sold seashells, chinoiserie and carnival masks to summer visitors on the seafront. A skate bought off the quay was a cheap and entirely standard studio subject with a famous precedent in Chardin's ray of 1728. He painted it dark and thickly, with none of the grinning faces that would take over his pictures a few years later. His brother Charles gave the canvas to the museum in Antwerp in 1930, by which time Ensor had been made a baron.