In my quintessential gap-year, I have had the opportunity to
examine my ‘home-town’ of Calcutta very closely. Nostalgic and dying amongst
other things, what peaked my interest was how a city can be a battle-ground for
arrogance. Cultural, racial, economic, political – in my mind’s eye, the
Calcutta of yore was a tempting mistress worthy of conquest, presumptuous in
praise and misgivings. As the records state, Calcutta has largely been a city
of choice. Composed from a mere scratch, its building blocks invariably
comprise élans of all shapes and sizes. The home of outlaws and upstarts, the
city of new and ambiguous etiquette, the conspicuous capital of the Merchants’ Empire.
And hence, it is no wonder that a painting like Johan Zoffany’s Last Supper would find a nest in one of
the city’s oldest churches.
Transcendent art! Whose magic skill alone,
Can soften rock, and animate a stone,
By symbol mark the heart, reflect the head,
And raise a living image from the dead!
[Inscription on James Achilles Kirkpatrick’s tomb]
Painted in 1787 during his visit to Calcutta, Last Supper is not as striking in its
German Neo-Classical composition as it is in its constituent ‘ingredients’. As
Kathleen Blechynden writes in Calcutta:
Past And Present, Zoffany already had a reputation for his ‘injudicious
indulgence in the habit of introducing the portraits of his friends and
acquaintances into his pictures without permission of the original, and often
in unflattering guise’. The large casts of people all readily recognized by his
contemporaries invited bitter animosity for him, leading him to abandon England
– where he enjoyed royal patronage – for a few years. In his altar-piece of the St. John’s Church
at Calcutta, he exercised his luxury with a spirit of liberality, this time in
an Indian setting. The sensation his feat caused encouraged him to paint
another similar Last Supper in England ten years later and make a gift of it to
the Brentford parish.
Inspired by Vinci, the painting is uncannily Indian – it has
a munshi’s tulwar, a Hindoostani spittoon, and a beesty bag filled with water. In the
foreground of the painting ‘are shown a great laver of brass with ewer and
small dish’. Jesus and his Apostles are said to be modelled on ‘members of the
fashionable Anglo – Indian society in Calcutta in the late 18th century’. The
Greek priest, Father Parthenio sat down to be painted as Jesus; Mary Magdalene
was fashioned on the transvestite police magistrate of 1780s Calcutta, W.C.
Blacquiere, who was ‘famous for stalking and rounding up criminals whilst
dressed as a woman’; Judas Iscariot was ‘pilloried on an old resident of the
town, William Tulloh, the auctioneer’; St. John on the Governor General, Warren
Hastings; and Simon on James Paul, the English Resident at the Royal Court of
Oudh who committed suicide a few years later. Unfortunately, ‘the remaining
figures appear to have been less exact portraits, and the names of others who
appeared in the canvas have not come down to the present day’.
Worsley in British
History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley: The Jewel in the Crown says, ‘the
picture borders on sacrilege’ and modern-day guides at the Church are
reminiscent of the horror with which the unveiling of the altarpiece was
received. It was ‘vandalised, left hanging, and sagging’ until its restoration
in 2010 by the INTACH Art Conservation Centre and the Goethe Institut of
Calcutta. Interestingly, if the Calcutta piece scandalously features the East
India Company officials, its Brentford counterpart stoops even lower to include
Zoffany as St. Peter, his young wife as St. John, the fishermen of
Strand-on-the-Green as the other Disciples, and his ‘black slave’ amongst other
characters. Unlike the former, the latter features both Caucasian and Black
faces, ‘in connection with the Jewish type’, engaging one to speculate that
Zoffany ‘wished to exemplify the three race of mankind – the descendants of
Shem, Ham, and Japhet – are sharers alike in the blessing of the New
Dispensation’. This ascertains one thing: the style of painting stemmed from
something more complex than a famous painter’s artistic whims.
I haven’t seen the Brentford painting and so I can only speak
for the one at Calcutta. I saw it as a teenager and it resembled a table with
some hungry men. Today, it resembles the gong that announces the potlatch that
was Calcutta. In it, closely intertwined with the creator’s psychology is the
creation’s psychology. The subversive painting might have captured a mere
Company meeting in the Council Chamber housed inside the Church, and can be
interpreted as steaming from the hauteur that came with the de facto rulers of an Empire commanding
vast wealth – independent administrators who were more than parliamentary
back-benchers wearing paper crowns. Zoffany himself assumed the being of God
the moment he stepped in to puppeteer the creation of Christ and his men. The
faces featured on the Disciples were the Apostles of Calcutta’s colonial
society, raised above the natives by the very virtue of their very being.
Acting on the ‘White Man’s Burden’, they were the benign ‘Nabob’ harbingers of
a new religion or in this case, civilization. Priceless and plainspoken, it
bears testimony to the racist, high-handed arrogance of the merchants who had
metamorphosed into rulers not so many years before. It is a piece of art with
an intricately blasphemous verbal tradition that is evocative of the great
lengths underwent to engineer a façade of British respectability for those ‘who
worshipped Mammon, while vowing to God’.
As far as Last Suppers go, this one is probably the most
candidly chesty and consciously wronged of them all!
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