Abendmahl (Skizze)

Fritz von Uhde's Abendmahl (Skizze) (Last Supper, Sketch, 1886) is a preparatory study for one of the German Naturalist painter's most controversial religious subjects — his tendency to depict New Testament scenes in contemporary German peasant settings, with Christ and his disciples appearing as working-class figures in ordinary German interiors. Uhde's 'modern religious painting' scandalized conservative German Catholic and Protestant taste while attracting admiration from those who saw in it a genuine attempt to make the Christian narrative immediate and human. The Last Supper in a Bavarian farmhouse rather than an Italian Renaissance interior was his most audacious statement.

The sketch quality of this work reveals Uhde's compositional thinking: how to arrange the large figure group around a working-class table while maintaining the familiar compositional reference to Leonardo's Last Supper that would make the iconographic subject legible. His loose sketch technique shows rapid notational marks indicating figures, table, and spatial arrangement. The palette would be naturalistic rather than religious-symbolic — the specific light of a German interior, the plain dress and faces of working people.