The present print was given by Ensor to his friend, the lawyer, writer and cultural historian Robert Goffin. A vocal critic of Nazi Germany, he predicted the German invasion of Belgium and emigrated to the USA at the beginning of World War II. Ensor’s dedication to him is dated 1939, indicating that he gave it to Goffin shortly before his departure to New York. As a cultural scholar, Goffin was particularly interested in Jazz music and wrote one of the earliest scholarly texts on the subject, Aux Frontières du Jazz, in 1932. He continued his studies and publications on the subject during his exile in the USA. In 1942, he collaborated with the British pianist Leonard Feather (1914 – 1994) to teach the first university course on the history and theory of Jazz at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a year later published another important text on Jazz history: Jazz, From the Congo to the Metropolitan.
After the war, he returned to his native Belgium and resumed his career as a lawyer.
We can only speculate why Ensor chose Diables rossant des anges et archanges as a present for his friend but one would think that the loose, sketchy and seemingly improvised composition of this plate would have appealed to Goffin’s jazz sensibility.
Many of the details of this print are inspired by the fantastical creatures of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also of Jacques Callot’s Tentation de Saint Antoine, while its deliberate, tapestry-like flatness shows the influence of folk and non-Western art.