The MoMA show is arranged chronologically, with around 120 pieces from his most creative period, from 1880 to the mid-1890s. The first room is lined with early, representational paintings: wintry street scenes, fruity still lives and some dark domestic portraits of family members. These are skilful works with impressionistic brush-strokes and rich impasto. Manet’s influence is palpable, as is Rembrandt’s. Yet only one canvas feels truly fresh. Painted in 1883, “The Scandalised Masks” is a domestic scene of sorts, in which a sorry-looking hunch of a man is startled from his drinking by an old woman at the door. They are both wearing masks: hers has cavernous eyeholes and a protuberant nose, while his has a long, sad nose. The effect is weirdly mesmerising. It is for good reason that this painting is the first to greet visitors when they enter the show.

Masks that both disguise and reveal became one of Ensor’s obsessions, along with experiments with light, images of death and carnivalesque approaches to religious subjects. Ms Swinbourne has managed to secure the first two enormous works from his Aureoles drawing series of 1885-86, which have never been seen before in America. They are remarkable, particularly the seven-foot (2.1-metre) “The Lively and Radiant: The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem”. Vast and detailed, it not only absorbs viewers, but virtually swallows them whole. Gazing at the vibrating and bizarre faces within the drawing, Ms Swinbourne remarks: “Even if I have failed at everything else in this show, at least I brought these here.”

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