Self-Portrait with Masks

This famously reclusive painter, who frequently used masks in his caustic satires of Belgian society, religion and politics, here, in this small painting, pokes fun at himself and his artistic status. Known for being a stay-at-home curmudgeon who worked for much of his life in the attic studio of his parents' seaside home, Ensor must have been amused by his success in the society that had harshly rejected him in the late 1880s, when his best-known painting, The Entry of Christ into Brussels of 1889, was refused by the Brussels avant-garde Salon. In Self-Portrait with Masks, the artist paints himself in the middle of a carnival throng. Only the heads are visible in the perspective, the bodies blocked by an agglomeration of weird and scary faces. Near the center of the canvas is the artist himself, looking a little apprehensive, but very human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters and skulls hemming him in on all sides. The painting begs questions about an artist who never managed to fit in.