STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART
CLAUDE-EMILE SCHUFFENECKER Fresne-Saint-Mamès 1851-1934 Paris
Coastal Cliffs, Normandy
Pastel on light brown paper. Stamped with the Schuffenecker atelier monogram1 (not in Lugt) at the lower left. 300 x 457 mm. (11 7/8 x 18 in.) [sheet]
Watermark Coat of arms with E and L flanking a caduceus.
Provenance The estate of the artist and by descent to his daughter, Jeanne Schuffenecker, Paris Possibly Jacques Fouquet, Galerie Les Deux Iles, Paris Private collection.
Born in Franche-Comté, Émile Schuffenecker studied with Paul Baudry in Paris in 1870, and later met Paul Gauguin when both worked at the stock brokerage firm of Bertin. The two remained lifelong friends, and an extensive correspondence between them survives. The stock market crash of 1882 led Schuffenecker to abandon his career as a stockbroker, and to support himself as an art teacher; a career he maintained, alongside his work as an artist, until 1914. In 1884 Schuffenecker was one of the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants and, along with Albert Dubois-Pillet and Odilon Redon, signed the statutes of the organization. Among the other artists taking part in the inaugural exhibition of the Indépendants was Georges Seurat, whose work greatly impressed Schuffenecker. He was invited to take part in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and began to achieve some commercial success around 1888, after Theo van Gogh held an exhibition of his work, alongside that of Gauguin and Federico Zandomeneghi, at the Galerie Boussod & Valadon in Paris. The following year Schuffenecker organized an exhibition at the Café Volpini of paintings by the ‘Groupe Impressionniste et Synthésiste’, including works by himself, Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and others.
The only solo exhibition of Schuffenecker’s work to be held in his lifetime took place in 1896 at the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant in Paris, and included seventeen paintings, twenty-one pastels and three drawings. Although by no means wealthy, Schuffenecker was able to support the careers of Gauguin, Bernard and other artists, whose works he purchased. In time he came to own a large number of works by Gauguin, as well paintings by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh and drawings by Odilon Redon and Charles Filiger, although he was forced to sell his collection following his divorce in 1903. As an artist, Schuffenecker remains little known today in comparison to Gauguin and some of his contemporaries, and only a handful of exhibitions have been devoted to him outside of France. Indeed, he was relatively obscure even in his lifetime, once describing himself as a man who, ‘placed in the margin, made himself at home there, without bitterness, without desire.’
This large sheet is a fine example of Schuffenecker’s mastery of pastel, which he used with considerable skill throughout his mature career. As one scholar has written, ‘The suitability of this medium to Schuffenecker’s particular vision cannot be overstated: pastel enabled Schuffenecker to establish the nuanced tonality, the forms softened by layers of light and shadow, recognizable as the implicit statement advocated by the symbolists…The pastels of Degas were no small contribution to the development of Schuffenecker’s technique…Like the master he so respected, Schuffenecker felt that the medium of pastel allowed him to retain luminous color without sacrificing the linear control which, again like Degas, he believed to be crucial.’2
This drawing may be dated to the 1880s or early 1890s, when Schuffenecker produced a number of paintings and pastels of coastal views in Brittany and Normandy, particularly near Yport and Étretat. The pastel landscapes of this period are among Schuffenecker’s finest works in this demanding medium. The scholar Jill Grossvogel has noted that ‘The lightness of pastel, its own evanescence, was especially appropriate to Schuffenecker’s landscapes and seascapes – its transparent qualities and the ease with which it could be manipulated were ideally suited to capturing movement, setting down images whose essence was literally fleeting, changing, inconstant in appearance at any given moment.’3 As another scholar has commented, ‘In his pastels from Normandy, the world appears as ephemerally fleeting reflections of an intensity that is matched only by the later works of Claude Monet. But Schuffenecker’s light is significantly cooler than Monet’s. Everything is enveloped in an atmospherically scintillating haze created by mixing white into the pigments.’4
Views of coastal cliffs were among the artist’s favourite subjects. As one scholar noted of Schuffenecker, writing a decade or so after the artist’s death, ‘Pure impressionist, he thought and he showed that the aiguille at Etretat, for example, taking advantage of the infinite play of light and the changing aspects with which that light adorned the rock formation, could summon up a world of sensations capable of providing the painter, throughout his entire life, work and delight.’5
A number of similar pastel drawings by Schuffenecker of cliffs at Étretat and elsewhere are in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest6, Tate Modern in London7 and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen8, as well as in several French private collections9. The present sheet is particularly close in composition to a slightly smaller pastel in a private collection10. An oil painting of Étretat by Schuffenecker, dated 1888, is in the Indianapolis Museum of Art11.
1. Schuffenecker’s studio stamp, which he designed in 1890, represents a stylized lotus flower, flanked with tendrils made up of the artist’s initials E and S.
2. Jill Grossvogel, ‘Margin & Image’, in Jill Grossvogel, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, Binghamton and New York, 1980-1981, p.19.
3. Ibid., p.19.
4. Jan Würtz Frandsen, Drawn Toward the Avant-Garde: Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century French Drawings from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, exhibition catalogue, 2002, p.130, under no.38.
5. Maximilien Gauthier in Paris, Galerie Berri-Raspail, Un Méconnu: Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, 1944; Quoted in translation in Grossvogel, op.cit., p.75.
6. Inv. 963.6.3, 963.6.4, 963.6.7 and 963.6.8
7. Inv. T3640, T3641 and T3642.
8. Inv. H.M. 1976-369 (Tu 35h, 4) and H.M. 1976-366 (Tu 35h, 1); Frandsen, op.cit., pp.128-131, nos.37-38.
9. Examples are illustrated in René Porro, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Une oeuvre melodieuse, Combeaufontaine, 1992, pp.172-173, figs.145-147 and p.199, figs.223-224.
10. Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis ‘Le Prieuré’, Emile Schuffenecker 1851-1934, exhibition catalogue, 1996- 1997, p.72, no.49.
11. Inv. 79.289; Pont-Aven and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ibid., p.49, no.23.