folk in the suburbs. He had not seen the connection between physical work, poverty and bad feeding before because he came from Riddrie, an in-between district where tradesmen and petty clerks like his father lived. He noticed too that the sleek office faces and roughened workshop ones had the same tight mouths. Nearly everyone looked anxious, smug or grimly determined. Such faces would suit the disciples, who had been chosen from labourers and clerks, but they wouldn’t suit Jesus. He began looking for harmonious faces whose mouths closed serenely. Most children had these when they sat still, but the people who kept them after adolescence were usually women with a mild, mysterious, knowing look. For a while he thought this might be the incarnate God’s expression, for Leonardo and the carvers of oriental Buddhas had thought so. One morning he found it on the face of a three-inch embryo in the university medical museum. The huge little head nodding over the bent-up knees, the great closed eyes and subtly smiling mouth seemed dreaming of a satisfying secret as big as the universe. And he saw such an expression could not belong to Christ, who had looked steadily at the people around him. He needed the face of a mature, sane, outward-looking man whose love abolished all advantage over whom he beheld, a face without triumph or blame in it because triumph is smug and condemnation is Devil’s work. He raked for a Christian expression among old drawings. A sketch of Coulter showed a calm unafraid friendly face but was far too wistful, and one of McAlpin was calm and strong but had disdainful eyelids. He decided to steal a face from a masterpiece, but in Glasgow Art Gallery the only good Christs were infants, apart from Giorgione’s “Christ and the Adulteress,” where the painter’s modesty or restorer’s cowardice had kept the holy face in shadow. He took a day trip to the National Gallery in Edinburgh and at last found the face in a trinity by Hugo Van der Goes. It came from the fifteenth century when the Flemish masters discovered oil paint and made brown the subtlest colour of all while keeping the crisp brightness of tempera. God sat on a clumsy gold and crystal throne floating among gaudy turbulent clouds. He wore a plain red robe with green lining and was preventing, by a hand under each armpit, a pained, thin, dead, nearly nude Christ from sliding off the seat beside him. A white pigeon hovered between their heads. God had the same ordinary thin brown face as his son and a look of pure sorrow without bitterness or blame. In spite of the golden seat neither he nor his son looked like well-paid men. They had the thin faces of providers, not owners or directors. And the suffering father, not the dead son, had Thaw’s sympathy. This was the face of his Christ, and he knew he could never paint it. Nobody can paint an expression that is not potentially their own, and this face was beyond him.
In the end he decided to imagine the supper as Jesus would see it from the head of the table. On each side of the board the disciples, anxious, hopeful, doubting, delighted, hungry, replete, were craning and leaning for a glimpse of the viewer’s face. The only visible part of Jesus was his hands on the tablecloth. They entered the picture from the bottom margin, and Thaw copied them from his father. He took so long preparing this picture that there was no time to paint it so he submitted the black and white cartoon.
The picture won no prize but was easy to photograph, and The Bulletin showed Molly Tierney and Aitken Drummond in front of it. A caption said, “Art students discuss Douglas Shaw’s interpretation of the Last Supper at the opening of Glasgow Art School’s summer exhibition.” Thaw took a copy of the paper into a lavatory cubicle to gloat over it. Though sick of the picture the published photograph gave him a moment’s pleasure of almost sexual potency. He went over to the refectory in a mood of unusual confidence and sat by Judy, who asked in a friendly way, “Duncan, did you enjoy drawing those unpleasant people? Or does your picture shock