James Ensor Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring Print

Bones to Pick: Meet the Magnificent Misanthrope 🦴

James Ensor (1860–1949) was, by most accounts, not an easy man to like — and he would probably have preferred it that way. Paranoid, self-obsessed, and deeply misanthropic, the Belgian symbolist painter compared himself to Jesus, bristled at criticism, and spent much of his career in bitter isolation from his modernist contemporaries in France and Germany.

Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, painted in 1891, is one of Ensor's most iconic and delightfully disturbing works. Two grinning skeletons face off against a pastel-puffed sky, each clenching either end of a single pickled herring between their teeth in a macabre tug-of-war. One skeleton wears a magnificent fur military hat with rakish absurdity; the other is dressed in vivid green. The whole scene floats somewhere between grotesque theatre and dark comedy.

Art historians have long speculated that the painting is a biting satire — Ensor's revenge fantasy against the critics who tore apart his work. The herring, after all, is a classic symbol of worthlessness and distraction (a "red herring"), and the two squabbling skeletons may represent the petty disputes of the art world. Ensor himself was never particularly forthcoming with explanations, which, of course, is entirely on brand. His visual language, full of skulls, masks, carnival chaos, and scatological wit, was playfully subversive and perhaps only ever fully understood by the artist himself.

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A Print Worthy of the Masterpiece 🎨

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