Study for 'The Last Supper' in St Alban's Church, Rochdale

This important early drawing is a study for the wall painting of The Last Supper that Moore executed as a reredos in St Alban's Church, Rochdale, Lancashire, in 1865. Carried out in oil on the plaster walls, the scheme also included a painting of The Feeding of the Five Thousand on the south side of the chancel, and figures of Christ, John the Baptist, the Elders of Revelation and the four Evangelists elsewhere in the church. It was one of a number of commissions for decorative paintings in churches and country houses that Moore obtained in the 1860s through his friendship with the architect William Eden Nesfield. For further details, see Victorian High Renaissance, exh. Manchester, Minneapolis and the Brooklyn Museum, 1979, cat. p. 131.

The other two drawings are much later. In fact the head of a man in profile to left would appear to be a study for the figure of the East Wind in Moore's very last painting, The Loves of the Winds and the Seasons (Blackburn At Gallery), completed only about a week before his death on 25 September 1893. For an illustration, see Victorian High Renaissance, cat. p. 155, or Albert Moore and his Contemporaries, exh. Newcastle upon Tyne, 1972, cat. pl. 29.