While I can't be sure this was the first painting in David's Last Supper series, it was certainly one of the earliest ones. I know this for two reasons. First, when I came up to Maine in December of 1994 with my camera gear to interview my father for a documentary I was making about him, this was one of about five or six Last Supper paintings that were completed at that time. The Last Supper by Leonardo Da VinciThere were many more to follow over the next five years. Also, this is the work that most closely resembles Leonardo da Vinci's famous Last Supper fresco in Milan, which my father spoke about in the interview. Here is what he said.

"The Last Supper, everybody's done it, it's a classic and its got all the ingredients. I still think the one I like best is the Leonardo because it's the classic, it's the one you measure everything else by. Too bad it's destroyed now, it's a fresco and it's just gone. But that's not important. It's important if you're religious but not important it you understand the form and the design of it, which was very subtle - a lot of interplay and a lot of reactions and stuff like that," said David. I think it's that 'interplay' that is at the core of David's Last Supper paintings.

Before painting this work my father did a drawing that closely resembles the painting above.

In both works you can see the form of Leonardo's work is the starting point. People are arranged horizontally behind a table, with the dominant figure of 'Jesus' in the center. Despite these similarities, the world inhabited by this cast of characters is very different from Leonardo's renaissance masterpiece. Behind Jesus the background retreats with use of a strong sense of perspective, but in a more dynamic, less rigid way than in Leonardo's work. And instead of 12 identifiable apostles, my father gives us a cast of characters that includes women and children, along with food being offered that goes beyond the wine and bread from the biblical story.

Describing what appealed to my father about the Last Supper story in the bible, my father had the following to say.

"That's a very pagan thing. Don't forget they just came from the dark ages. This was way back and there they are, doing this strange, heathen thing, drinking symbolic blood and eating symbolic body, that' pretty raw. But consider it from the political point of view or any other point of view that you want and it's a real case in point for exploration. Imagine twelve men sitting around and they've got this great nut who they fear, admire, are attached to in some way, scared of - he's a bulldozer - and he invites them to dinner that night and drops this bomb 'One of you guys is a scab' kind of thing..... Not that precise moment necessarily, but just the interaction between that many people is fraught with great significance and you can play with that idea from now until whenever."