Esqueleto observando chinoiserias

Ensor painted this interior in 1885, and at that stage it was a quiet thing, a figure in a room bent over a Japanese picture book, done in the loose bright manner he had picked up at the academy in Brussels. Around 1888 he went back into it. He added a skull in the lower left corner and gave the seated figure a skull as well, two small changes that altered what the picture was about. He was doing this to finished canvases all through those years, reopening them and turning them strange, and 1888 was also the year he painted the Entry of Christ into Brussels. The painting belongs to the King Baudouin Foundation, which placed it on long-term loan with the Ghent museum in 1995.