Squelettes se disputant un pendu

By 1891 James Ensor felt his critics were hunting him. Reviewers in Belgium called his work ugly and mad, and he answered them on canvas. Two skeletons, dressed as women and armed with a broom and an umbrella, brawl across a stage over a third figure who hangs limp between them. The quarreling pair are usually read as his critics, squabbling like fishwives, and the helpless body they fight over as Ensor himself. Masked spectators crowd the wings, some for him, some against. He painted it in his early thirties, working in the attic above his family's souvenir shop in the seaside town of Ostend, surrounded by the carnival masks they sold downstairs. Those masks turn up in painting after painting from these years.