Ensor’s artistic leap into unreality is next. Isolated from his modernist peers in France and Germany (and often resentful of them), he managed to create a dreamy visual language all his own. Ensor’s vivid critiques of Belgian culture are playfully subversive and scatologically immature. His more nightmarish paintings, such as his 1891 work, “Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring” (pictured), are strangely unsettling. Only one picture is notable for its absence: “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889”, Ensor’s mural-sized burlesque masterpiece, which the Getty Museum refused to loan for this show.

Ensor was not his own best ambassador. He was paranoid, self-obsessed and misanthropic. He chafed at criticism and compared himself to Jesus; his journals would try any reader’s patience. When he died in 1949, aged 89, he had not produced a work of note for decades. But the real hindrance to placing Ensor has always been his imagination-the way he worked beyond ordinary “isms”. This show, by revealing the extent of his quirky ingenuity, promises to generate a level of attention he hasn’t had for years.

© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009