Laura Cumming reviews Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on view through January 29, 2017.

Cumming writes: “To find oneself burled up in life’s turbulence – single cells metastasising in unpredictable throngs – that is Ensor’s modern danse macabre. His predecessors may be Bosch and Goya, and perhaps Watteau in the eerie loneliness of certain pictures. But the sustained energy of his pen and brush, the graphic freedom of his theatrical scenarios is all his own. To be oneself when the onslaught is going the other way: that is his lifelong principle.”