Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals

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Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals: Introduction

James Ensor leaves almost no room for escape in Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals. A skeletal figure sweeps above a narrow city street with an immense scythe, while faces, bodies and buildings lock the people below into a single forward surge. The image is small enough to hold in the hands, but its crowd seems to exceed its boundaries.

This is a print, not a painting. The page discussed here is the etching on paper held by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, or MSK Gent, as inventory 1998-B-104. It belongs to a family of impressions pulled from the same printed composition, and it must be distinguished from sheets in New York and Brussels as well as from Ensor’s related drawing of 1887.^[1]

At a Glance

• ArtistJames Ensor (1860–1949).
• Date1896.^[1]
• MediumEtching on paper; this identification follows the MSK Gent record for the target impression.^[1]
• Dimensions235 × 175 × 22 millimetres as recorded by MSK Gent.^[1]
• CollectionMSK Gent Print Room, inventory 1998-B-104.^[1]
• SubjectA personified skeletal Death drives people of every social position through a compressed city beneath signs of judgment and catastrophe.^[1][2]

Contents

1. Introduction
2. One Composition, One Particular Impression
3. Following Death through the City
4. Line, Density and Directional Force
5. What the “Flock” Means
6. Triumph of Death, Bosch and Bruegel
7. From the 1887 Drawing to the 1896 Etching
8. States, Hand Colouring and Other Impressions
9. Collection Context and Comparisons

One Composition, One Particular Impression

An etching begins with a matrix rather than a blank sheet. Lines drawn through a resistant coating are bitten into a metal plate; ink lodged in those recesses is then transferred to paper under pressure. The printed image can therefore exist in more than one impression. Those sheets share a design, but differences in paper, ink, inscriptions, wear, later intervention and condition make them separate objects.

The target here is the MSK Gent sheet. Its record names the medium simply as etching on paper and gives the inventory number 1998-B-104. At lower left it carries the signature “J. Ensor” and the title La mort qui passe, meaning “Death passing.” MSK acquired it in 1998 from the collection of Auguste Taevernier.^[1] Those are impression-level facts and should not be replaced by data attached to another museum’s print.

The institutional English title, Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals, directs attention to pursuit. The shorter inscription on the sheet emphasizes passage. Together they suggest a force that both hunts and moves inexorably onward: Death does not stop after entering this street.

Following Death through the City

Start at the top, where the largest skeletal attacker appears above the architecture. Its spread body and huge scythe establish a downward pressure before individual victims become legible. The blade is not a small emblem tucked beside a figure. It spans space, converting the air above the street into a threat.

Below it, people jam the roadway. MSK identifies authorities, clergy, soldiers, shopkeepers and workers among the fugitives.^[1] Faces overlap, limbs are abbreviated and open mouths repeat. Some heads read almost like masks because a few lines harden them into a grimace. The crowd is numerous enough to contain social differences, yet dense enough to erase anyone’s private route out.

The buildings do not provide safety. At the right, Ensor opens an interior in which a nude woman raises a drink among companions. The episode can be read as indifference or indulgence continuing while disaster arrives. Nearby, Death reaches toward a pregnant woman on a balcony, extending mortality toward life that has not yet begun.^[1][2] The detail is severe because no category—private or public, unborn or adult—receives an exemption.

At the upper corners, small groups hover amid radically different signs. MoMA sees haloed beings on one side and terrified figures engulfed in flames on the other, suggesting heaven, hell and the Day of Judgment.^[2] MSK phrases the reading more cautiously as two groups that may symbolize heaven and hell.^[1] Their uncertainty matters. They frame the chase with a possible cosmic destination without offering the people below a visible path toward either outcome.

Line, Density and Directional Force

Etching allows Ensor to build movement through accumulation. Short strokes define teeth, sockets, hats and windows; longer contours steer bodies through the vertical field. Hatching darkens pockets between figures, while pale paper keeps other heads briefly distinct. The crowd emerges from repeated marks rather than the continuous coloured surface of Ensor’s paintings.

Repetition is the engine. One grimacing face might be a caricature, but dozens become a collective condition. Diagonals created by scythes, roofs and leaning bodies prevent the eye from resting. Even when a figure faces outward, the surrounding lines push the gaze back into the stream. The apparent abundance is highly economical: an eye socket, hat brim or open jaw can establish a social type at miniature scale.

The narrow proportions intensify the chase. Horizontal escape is blocked by architecture, while the elevated Death dominates the only open zone. The street behaves like a chute. Viewers move from the airborne skeleton down into the packed heads, then discover smaller incidents that send attention back upward. That circulation makes the print feel relentless rather than merely crowded.

What the “Flock” Means

The title’s “flock” is deliberately unflattering. It turns citizens into a herd driven by a force they cannot negotiate with. Yet Ensor does not render the people identical. Rank and occupation remain visible enough for the leveling action of mortality to register. Clergy, military figures, officials, labourers, merchants, revelers, women and children share exposure.^[1]

This mixture supports both social satire and a universal statement. MSK cautiously proposes that recurring unrest during the 1880s may have informed the crowd.^[1] The suggestion is plausible context, not identification of one documented march. Ensor had already made processions and compressed urban masses into instruments of political and institutional critique. Here, however, Death attacks every faction, including people who might ordinarily claim authority over others.

The scene is not compassionate in a conventional sense. Ensor exaggerates panic and allows grotesque comedy to remain visible. MoMA reads the right-hand revelers as evidence of the debauchery, cruelty and indifference he perceived in society.^[2] At the same time, no moral elite stands outside the chase to judge everyone else. The satire encompasses the social order; the mortality theme encompasses its satirist and viewers too.

The masks, carnival and satire context helps explain why the fleeing faces can look both individual and theatrical. A grimace reveals fear while also becoming a public performance. The flock is frightening because it is full of people and because those people can no longer act as autonomous selves.

Triumph of Death, Bosch and Bruegel

MSK places the composition within the medieval tradition of the Triumph of Death.^[1] In that tradition, skeletal forces demonstrate that worldly status cannot resist mortality. Ensor modernizes the structure through contemporary streets, occupations and crowd psychology. The result is not an archaeological reconstruction of a medieval image; it is an old warning made urban.

MoMA additionally relates Ensor’s macabre, satirical vision to earlier Flemish art, especially Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.^[2] That curatorial comparison is valuable without requiring the claim that he copied one identifiable scene. Bosch offers precedents for crowded judgment and hybrid terror; Bruegel for populous compositions in which small human actions accumulate into social panorama. Ensor compresses comparable energies into a plate whose linear intensity belongs to his own graphic practice.

The skeleton also changes roles across the wider oeuvre. In Masks Confronting Death, a central deathly figure faces a close ring of masks. In Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, two bony rivals continue a petty quarrel after death. Here Death is neither surrounded spectator nor foolish competitor. It is an active personification with a weapon and a whole population as its field.

From the 1887 Drawing to the 1896 Etching

The date of the print does not mark the invention of every part of the scene. MSK records an earlier drawing with the same subject, made in 1887 and held by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp as inventory 2741. Apart from several details, the museum considers the drawing and later etching identical.^[1] They remain different works in different media: the Antwerp sheet is not an impression of the 1896 plate.

That chronology places the composition at two moments in Ensor’s career. The idea emerged during the later 1880s, when fantastic drawing, social crowds and skeletal imagery were becoming central. The print followed in 1896, after the most concentrated early phase of his etching activity. Sabine Taevernier explains that Ensor increasingly used printmaking to give existing creations wider visibility after 1891.^[3] Translating the earlier drawing into a printable matrix fits that pattern without making the etching a mere mechanical copy.

The nine-year interval also warns against reading the work only through one biographical event. MSK notes that death became more persistent in Ensor’s art from 1887, the year his father and grandmother died.^[1] Their deaths are relevant context, but the finished print addresses a far broader field of social behaviour, religious judgment and shared impermanence.

States, Hand Colouring and Other Impressions

Ensor’s prints demand object-specific language. The Flemish Art Collection explains that he often printed plates at different times, on varying papers and in changing quantities. Some plates received small additions or substantial revision, and signatures do not always provide a simple date because he sometimes signed older sheets later.^[4] A state records a change to the matrix; an impression is one sheet printed from it. The terms are related but not interchangeable.

The MSK record does not assign 1998-B-104 to a named state, so no state should be supplied by inference. It also catalogues the sheet as etching on paper without listing watercolour, gouache or coloured pencil.^[1] Ensor did hand-colour some impressions of some prints, particularly later in life, but that general practice does not make every sheet hand-coloured.^[4][5]

MoMA object 251.1952 is a separate impression. Its record uses the fuller medium description “drypoint and etching,” gives its own plate and sheet measurements, and identifies its own acquisition history.^[2] Those details describe the New York object, not the Ghent one. Likewise, the high-resolution KBR image records a Royal Library of Belgium impression with shelfmark S.II 83523.^[6] It is an excellent comparison for the shared design, but it is not a digital photograph of MSK 1998-B-104.

This distinction is not pedantry. Printing creates resemblance without identity. Paper edges, inscriptions, ink strength and later colour can change how density and detail appear, even when the composition is common to all impressions. The broader prints and drawings guide follows those differences across Ensor’s graphic work.

Collection Context and Comparisons

MSK Gent holds the target impression in its Print Room. The museum’s record identifies a 1998 purchase from the Auguste Taevernier collection and currently marks the sheet as not on display.^[1] Collection ownership is therefore more dependable than assuming it will be hanging during any particular visit.

Scale clarifies its place in Ensor’s art. Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 stretches a modern procession across more than four metres of canvas; this etching compresses another urban mass into a field less than a quarter metre high. Both make crowds overwhelm individuals, but their means differ. Colour and banner compete for attention in the painting. In the print, black line, repetition and pressure do the work.

Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals is powerful because reproduction and intimacy coexist. The matrix allowed the image to appear on multiple sheets, while each viewer must approach closely enough to enter its miniature panic. Ensor turns the broadest possible subject—the death of everyone—into a dense encounter between eye, ink and paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK Gent), “Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals”. View source; inventory 1998-B-104; accessed 30 August 2026.
2. Museum of Modern Art, “Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals”. View source; object 251.1952; accessed 30 August 2026.
3. Flemish Art Collection, “Ensor as Graphic Artist”. View source; Sabine Taevernier; James Ensor: An Online Museum; accessed 30 August 2026.
4. Flemish Art Collection, “Ensor as Graphic Artist: Editions and States”. View source; accessed 30 August 2026.
5. Museum of Modern Art, “New to the Print Collection: James Ensor”. View source; 2012; accessed 30 August 2026.
6. KBR, Royal Library of Belgium, “Death Chasing the Flock of Mortals”. View source; impression S.II 83523, file record hosted by Wikimedia Commons; accessed 30 August 2026.

More ENSOR Artworks

Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889

The Intrigue

Masks Confronting Death

The Oyster Eater

Self-Portrait with Flowered Hat

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring

Astonishment of the Mask Wouse