The Last Supper

Description

This sheet belongs to a set of drawings that Delacroix made toward the very end of his life, from January to February 1862. The exact purpose of these drawings is unknown. Until now only ten such drawings have been recorded, most on the theme of the Passion of Christ. These drawings are in museums in Amiens, Bremen, Bucharest, and Princeton, in the Louvre, and in a private collection in Paris. All seem to have been executed in brown ink with a reed pen. Hovering on the edge of abstraction, they are audaciously minimalistic in their use of broad, loose pen strokes describing loops and blunt marks, which dissolve the figures into signs of spirituality without relinquishing narrative meaning. Himself a skeptic in religious matters, Delacroix was drawn to these scenes, rendering them with a directness of expression rivaling that in Rembrandt’s late works, which with they have been compared.