L'Entrée du Christ à Bruxelles en 1889

Ensor painted this enormous canvas in 1888, more than four metres wide, and dated the scene one year into the future, 1889. It imagines Christ riding a donkey into modern Brussels, and almost nobody notices him. He's a tiny haloed figure far back in the crowd, all but swallowed by a carnival mob under a huge red banner reading Long live the social Christ. And the mob is the real subject: hundreds of leering, grinning, hollow faces, most of them masks. Ensor grew up over his family's shop in the seaside town of Ostend, which sold carnival masks among the trinkets, and he used them all his life to strip the politeness off people and show what he thought was underneath. His own artists' group, Les Vingt, refused to hang it. The picture stayed rolled up and largely unseen in his studio for decades, not shown in public until 1929, and it's been at the Getty since 1987.