The Last Supper: Marion Albert Pruett

In 1979 Marion Albert Pruett was released early from a 23-year sentence for bank robbery and placed in the witness protection program in exchange for his testimony implicating a prominent underworld figure in the murder of his cellmate.  (Pruett would later confess that he was, in fact, responsible for the murder.)

Once in witness protection Pruett was given $800 and new name.  Under his new alias Pruett embarked in a year-long crime spree that would result in the deaths of 5 people, including his wife.  From death row Pruett attempted to coerce a Mississippi newspaper into paying him $20,000 to revel the location of his dead wife’s engagement ring and, moreover, he offered to disclose the location of the remains of another victim in exchange for an appearance on the talk show Geraldo.

Pruett was executed by lethal injection on April 13, 1999.

Pruett’s final meal consisted of a stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut, 4 Whoppers from Burger King, french fries, fried eggplant, fried squash, fried okra, a bottle of Pepsi, a bucket of ice, a bottle of ketchup, and a pecan pie.

In an interview the condemned man claimed that he intended to share this substantial meal with another inmate who was scheduled to be executed on the same day. Pruett added that he would have preferred a roast duck, but didn’t think the prison would provide that meal. 

Inspiration and Interpretation

In this composition I swapped Pruett’s elaborate meal of fast food and fried vegetables for his original preference.  Pruett’s duck is arranged in the style of a Dutch game still life.  The dead animal dangles lifelessly over the table, feathers plucked, slit throat clearly visible, eyes dead.  

To reinforce the underlying themes of transience and decay in this image Pruett’s duck is accompanied by a bouquet of dying flowers whose muted pink and purple tones give the only splash of light in the colour palette.   I drew some inspiration from a Jean-Simeon Chardin piece called Still Life with Game which pairs dead fowl and rabbits with a single orange.  As an homage to Chardin I included the three rotten lemons on the right hand side of the composition and, tucked behind these, the careful eye might spot three rotting duck gizzards, reinforcing the themes of death and decay.