The Last Supper, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, 1896

Dagnan-Bouveret spent years on this painting before it appeared at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in 1896, including research trips undertaken specifically to get the physical details of the setting right, an unusual level of preparation for a subject painted many thousands of times before him.

He was a leading figure of the French Naturalist school, and it shows in how deliberately this picture avoids the idealised, softly lit treatment the Last Supper usually receives. He was also among the first painters of his generation to use photography as a working tool, staging and photographing models to study expression and gesture before ever touching a brush to canvas, which gives the apostles around the table a specificity, almost a documentary weight, that older versions of the same scene rarely have.

Christ sits at the centre, lit by a source that never actually appears within the frame, blessing the bread and wine while the men around him register the news of the coming betrayal on their faces rather than through any symbolic gesture. It is a psychological reading of the scene more than a devotional one.

Source: Musée d'Orsay, Paris.