The Last Supper, 1898. Watercolour heightened with gouache and gold paint; 11 x 25 inches (28 x 63.5 cm). Whereabouts unknown.
This is a design of 1898 for a mosaic reredos that forms part of the east wall decoration in the Church of St. Chad in Kirkby, Merseyside. Holiday had much earlier made a design for The Last Supper for stained glass for James Powell & Sons. This design was used initially at the Church of St. Luke in Preston, Lancashire in 1864. Only three figures were included in this design – Christ in the centre with St. John directly on his right and Judas on his left. William Burges commissioned a Last Supper window by Holiday for Waltham Abbey that was installed in June 1867. In this window Christ and all twelve disciples are represented. In all of Holiday’s designs for this subject Judas is the only disciple without a halo around his head. In the mosaic designs Judas is seen leaving the supper on his way to betray Christ.
In 1887 Holiday had designed and executed a large mosaic altarpiece of The Last Supper for the Church of St. Stephen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In his Reminiscences Holiday described this project: “I had been asked in 1887 to design a large mosaic altarpiece, about twelve feet long, for a church in Philadelphia; the subject to be ‘The Last Supper,’ with figures nearly life-size. I had never executed a mosaic, though I had designed a large one in 1866, which was carried out by a decorating firm. Since then I had studied the finest Italian mosaics; I had learnt how lamentable the work of the commercial houses was, and I welcomed the opportunity of seeing a mosaic carried through, so as to bring out the beauty of the material” (319-20). This was a work of great labour and three assistants were engaged to carry out the draperies and background. Holiday also noted: “my wife gave invaluable help with the heads for which her embroidery had given her the right kind of practice” (322-23) Holiday himself had to constantly supply coloured detail-drawings showing the various colours and the direction of the lines of the tesserae. The Hadleys noted: “Twelve years later another Last Supper was made for Kirby, near Liverpool where the mosaic is surrounded by decorations in Opus Sectile, a further medium in which Holiday excelled. In this type of work the design is carried out in cut pieces of coloured tile, painted were necessary and fired, as with glass. The parts are then embedded in cement… Holiday commented ‘it is far less costly than mosaic, but harmonises well with it, and for some situations is more suitable’” (64-65). A writer for The Studio Magazine discussed Holiday’s use of this technique:
“In ‘opus sectile,’ to which Mr. Holiday has devoted much attention, there is a mixture of the methods of working which are customary in stained-glass making and in the use of mosaic, though the process of the art are such that it can be more aptly described as an opaque stained glass than as a variation on mosaic. It is in its general principles based upon the inlaying in coloured marbles which was practiced by the Romans; but the material now used is not marble but opaque coloured glass, which can be cut into the required shapes and pieced together to form the design, just as is done with a transparent glass in a window. The lines which defines smaller details, like the features of a face or the folds of a drapery, are painted on the surface of the glass and burnt in, exactly as they are in a window; but the pieces of glass, after being fired in the glass-painter’s oven, or not fixed together with leads but with cement, by which they are attached to the wall. What light and shade effect there may be in the design is obtained by painting, not, as in mosaic, by the use of tesserae of various tones of colour to suggest shading…He has used a mixture of mosaic and ‘opus sectile’ on many occasions with complete success. He advocates strongly the advantages of the latter process over the former for decorations on a small scale, though he admits that it cannot be made to rival mosaic in splendour of effect. But mosaic, he holds, is best applied in large masses, and at a considerable distance from the eye; and necessarily, from the slow and elaborate way it must be work, it is far more costly than ‘opus sectile.’ [114-15]
Holiday’s design for this mosaic has much in common with his friend Albert Moore’s much earlier designs of The Last Supper carried out in fresco for the Church of St. Alban’s, Rochdale, Lancashire, in 1864. Moore, however, was much more limited in how to formulate his design due to the architecture of the space with which he had to work.
The Studio Magazine in discussing Holiday as a decorative artist felt he was pre-eminently a classicist: ‘The sketch for The Last Supper, for instance, with its severely sculptural character and balanced formality, is conceived in an essentially classic spirit” (110).
Bibliography
Hadley, Dennis and Joan Hadley. “Henry Holiday, 1839-1927.” The Journal of Stained Glass XIX (1989-90): 48-69.
Holiday, Henry. Reminiscences of My Life. London: Heinemann, 1914.
“The Decorative Work of Mr. Henry Holiday.” The Studio XLVI (1909): 106-15.
Created 22 January 2023