Cristo che placa le acque

Ensor spent his whole life in Ostend, mostly in the rooms above his family's shop, which sold shells, curiosities and carnival masks to summer visitors. By 1891 the town was Leopold II's favourite resort and was being rebuilt to suit him, with the Brussels trains emptying onto the front every season. Ensor was 31 and still barely selling. Two years earlier his own group, Les XX, had voted on expelling him and he survived by a single vote, and his enormous Christ's Entry into Brussels lay rolled up in the studio after they refused to hang it.

He had taken up this subject before in drawing and came back to it in oil here, a canvas a metre high, Christ quieting a squall out on the water. In those same years he more than once gave Christ his own face.

Mu.ZEE in Ostend has it, a few streets back from that sea, presented by the Friends of James Ensor.