The Mosaic Mural of the Last Supper that presides over the church altar was created by Henry Holiday by 1889. The mosaic is a memorial to the matriarch of a prominent Philadelphia family of congregants, the wife of James Magee. The memorial’s donors, her children, were inspired by a new Last Supper mosaic they’d seen over the main altar of Westminster Abbey in London.
The family commissioned the mosaic in 1887 from an eminent English painter-designer, Henry Holiday, who provided two stained-glass windows commemorating their father and sister for the St. Stephen’s transept 10 years earlier. View Holiday’s stained glass creations for the Magee Family on the altar wall of the Furness Burial Cloister
About Last Supper imagery
An image of the Last Supper often appears over Christian altars because of their symbolic connection. The subject is Christ’s final dinner with the Apostles before he was betrayed, tried, and crucified; during their meal he described their forthcoming mission and rites as a new church [assembly in Christ]. The dinner itself, a Jewish Seder, provided the model for the Christian Eucharist (or Communion or Lord’s Supper), with bread and wine, served at a table or altar, given new meaning as Christ’s body as covenant with us throughout time.
Design
Holiday designed and executed the mural with his wife Kate, a much-admired fiber artist, as well as Salviati’s Venetian mosaicists working in London. The mosaic had great impact in London’s avant-garde Arts and Crafts exhibition of 1888 before traveling to Philadelphia, where it was installed in the church in 1890.
The current frame (its second), Tiffany’s delicate, pale chancel decoration of 1917, showcases the vitality of the whole, drawing us with its size, sumptuous color and light-catching surfaces.
Figures are life size and the all-important still life (the wine jar and bread) draw our gaze.
Arrested by the compelling presence of the whole even from afar, we are invited to reflect on the many stories within and meanings of the momentous event the mosaic brings to us.