The Last Supper In Kolkata: A Brief History Of A Scandalous Masterpiece

If you head towards the river from the Bengal Raj Bhavan’s main gate on Council House Street, just past the Old Post Office Street, you will see the historic steeple of St. John’s Church — one of the oldest public buildings in Kolkata. Modelled on St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, the 238-year-old Church is home to one of the most fascinating depictions of Christ’s Last Supper in the world: not another imitation of the famous Da Vinci, but a scandalous original by German-Jewish neoclassical painter Johan Zoffany (born 1733, or ’35, as Johannes Josephus Zaufallij). Once the altarpiece of St. John’s, the painting now hangs on the wall to the left of the pipe organ — almost hidden in plain sight.

A Brief History Of Johan Zoffany’s ‘The Last Supper’ (1787)

Johan Zoffany arrived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) in the early 1780s, seeking the patronage of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal and one of the most powerful men in the British Empire at the time. Zoffany’s reputation preceded him: he was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Artists, a neoclassicist favoured by King George III and Queen Charlotte, the kind of artist who could make the powerful look both dignified and human. As St. John’s Church neared completion, Zoffany was the obvious choice to paint its altarpiece. He completed the commission on April 9, 1787, a few months before the church was consecrated as the Anglican Cathedral of Calcutta.

At first glance, the painting is a by-the-book interpretation of the Last Supper tableau: Christ at the centre of the table with his twelve apostles on the eve of his crucifixion. But Zoffany was not interested in veneration. Rather than idealised biblical figures, he populated the canvas with real men from Calcutta’s British-European merchant and administrative upper echelons, using their faces to stand in for the apostles. The face of Christ was modelled on Father Parthenio, a Greek Orthodox priest based in the city. Judas was given the face of William Tulloh, an auctioneer with whom Zoffany reportedly had a bitter personal history. And for St. John — traditionally painted as gentle, even effeminate — Zoffany chose W.C. Blacquiere, a police magistrate known across colonial Calcutta for cross-dressing as a woman to entrap criminals.

Zoffany’s ‘The Last Supper’ is also formally distinctive for its Baroque style, especially in its dramatic play of light, or ‘chiaroscuro’, developed by Italian painters and later absorbed and refined by Dutch artists. The painting features sudden flashes of moonlight against dark clouds, with light falling on the table with a kind of holy intensity that makes the scene feel both theatrical and intimate. The paraphernalia are also unmistakably Indian: a water ewer that resembles an 18th-century Hindustani spittoon; a leather water bag, colloquially called ‘pakhlior’, ‘mashki’, or ‘mashaq’, traditionally associated with water carriers known as ‘bhisti’; and a curved sword of the kind typically carried by a common Indian soldier at the time. Here, the biblical scene is subtly but unmistakably colonised, relocated to a city Zoffany had spent years observing with a keen eye for its social textures.

The painting sparked an immediate outrage in the city’s high society. Calcutta’s British-European ruling class, growing more concerned with propriety and respectability under the Cornwallis administration, was not pleased. Here was a sacred altarpiece in their new cathedral, and it looked unmistakably like a satirical portrait of themselves. The figure of Judas was a personal settling of scores. The portrayal of St. John was a pointed joke about a man whose gender nonconformity was an open secret. It was as if Zoffany had decided, masterfully and in oil paint, to humiliate his enemies.

The Painter As A Provocateur

This was entirely in keeping with Zoffany’s character. He had made a habit of embedding social commentary and biting satire into ostensibly formal paintings. His earlier work, ‘Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match’, commissioned by Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Awadh, was a sprawling, carnivalesque document of Indo-British society in Lucknow which depicted the Nawab with an erection. Another painting, ‘Tribune of the Uffizi’, had gotten him into trouble in London for including British residents of Florence who were not approved of by the establishment, such as painter Thomas Patch, a known homosexual at a time homesexuality was seen as a sin by both the church and the state. His version of ‘The Last Supper’ was simply the latest instalment in a career-long tendency to use commission as a cover for something far more radical.

Zoffany left India for good in 1789 — shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands on his voyage home to England where he allegedly became “the first and last Royal Academician to have become a cannibal”, according to William Dalrymple. But that is a tale for another time. The painting remained in the city, even as the city itself transformed from Calcutta to Kolkata. It was restored in 2010 through a collaboration between INTACH and the Goethe Institute, and hangs on the wall to the left of the church’s pipe organ today. You can see it if you visit St. John’s anytime between 10 am and 4 pm from Monday to Saturday.

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