James Ensor, The Skeleton Painter (1895 or 1896), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

I have to admit that the Belgian painter James Ensor has never ranked very high among the modern artists I find most compelling nor occupied a conspicuous place in my mental image bank. I don’t suppose I have a really firm grip on more than a handful of his paintings, chiefly his best known work, the enormous Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), with its collapsed space, its graphic billboard colors, and its crowd of helmeted soldiers and weird faces. Then there are the Museum of Modern Art’s canvases: The Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887), like a loosely sketched, painterly version of a Hieronymus Bosch, executed in more or less the same red, white, and blue palette as the Los Angeles picture, and Masks Confronting Death (1888), with its snouty, half-length figures, surrounding a skeleton in a modish red hat. And, in Buffalo, there’s the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s startlingly simplified Fireworks (1887), a funnel-shaped explosion of orange and gold that always make me think of Goya for some reason. This quartet of works, all made about the same time, have long defined Ensor for me.

Oddly enough, he has also long been defined for me not by an image, but by something he wrote: a self-aggrandizing,