SCHUFFENECKER, Emile

French painter. In 1871 he entered the stockbroking firm of Bertin, where he met Paul Gauguin who was also employed there. In his spare time he took drawing classes and studied with Paul Baudry (1828-1886) and Carolus-Duran, making his début at the Salon in 1874. He also became acquainted with Armand Guillaumin and Camille Pissarro. Following the stock market crash of 1882, he, like Gauguin, was forced to leave Bertin’s and gained a job teaching art at the Lycée Michelet in Vanves.

In 1884 he was one of the co-founders of the Salon des Indépendants and took part in the 8th and last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, the year in which he also met Emile Bernard in Concarneau and sent him on to see Gauguin, thus initiating their joint development of Cloisonnism. Though he mixed with the members of the Pont-Aven group his own artistic tastes were very different. While Gauguin and his disciples had little more than contempt for Neo-Impressionism, Schuffenecker was much interested in Pointillist techniques.

A friend of Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon, and one of the first collectors of works by Vincent van Gogh, Schuffenecker was instrumental in establishing the Volpini exhibition, in 1889. His own work, however, tends to have been neglected since his death. Since the late 1920s he was suspected to have imitated the work of other contemporary artists, among them, van Gogh. Still a contentious issue, it has not been established whether he produced forgeries.