Squelettes se disputant un hareng saur

Hareng saur is French for a smoked herring, and said aloud it runs very close to art Ensor. That is the joke in this panel, which is only 16 by 21 centimetres. Two skeletons are pulling the fish apart. The fish is the painter and the skeletons are the critics.

He had grounds for it. In 1891 Ensor was 31, exhibiting with the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX and being taken apart in the press, and his own colleagues inside the group had voted on whether to throw him out. He went on painting masks and skeletons for another 50 years, was made a baron in 1929 and died at Ostend in 1949.

The panel came to the Belgian royal museums in 1990, left to them by a Brussels collector.