When Claude-Emile Schuffenecker (1851-1934) moved from 29, rue Boulard to the much larger, luminous studio at 12, rue Duraud-Claye, “the walls of the ground floor and first floor literally disappeared behind a rare collection of priceless works.” For in addition to being an accomplished artist, subtle colourist, and skilled draughtsman, Claude-Emile was also a well known avant-garde collector whose “unique” collection at the turn of the century was dramatically expanded at the time of this move. Among the first to acquire works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Emile Bernard and Redon, Schuffenecker was also one of the founders of the Salon des Indépendents in 1884 and responsible for the famous Volpini synthetist exhibition at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair that had so dramatically broken with Salon tradition.
Contemporaries refer to Claude-Emile’s gentle but biting irony, often tinged with bitterness resulting from a lack of recognition by the press and the failure of his only one-man exhibition of 1896. He was a complicated and difficult man. “To win his approval one had to be a Gauguin, a Cézanne, a Van Gogh, a Redon, and sometimes even that was not enough,” according to Maximilien Gauthier. To wit, Claude-Emile complained in a letter written in 1921, that the public was turning Cézanne, whom he admired, into a “master-initiator, a kind of god, yet another idol to debunk.”
Judith Gérard in 1894, and Daniel de Monfreid a decade later, both close to Gauguin, confirm the disintegration of Schuffenecker’s marriage to his cousin who had been obliged, in 1880, to wed for financial reasons; by 1899 Louise filed for divorce despite her husband’s steady income as a drawing instructor, the rents collected from an apartment building worth FFr100,000 on the rue Parurle, and the profitable sale of his portion of a gold-plating business. But his art collection was of no interest to her—until 1904 when, as part of the divorce settlement drawn up in 1903 under the community property laws, Amédée Schuffenecker (1853-1936), Claude-Emile’s brother, offered to purchase the more than 120 pieces, including Claude-Emile’s own paintings, supposedly to keep it “in the family.”
Amédée buys his brother’s collection—to sell
But Amédée always intended to sell off the valuable works. Frequent changes and translations in titles make it difficult to trace the peregrinations of the Van Goghs in particular, although a ground-breaking exhibition of 130 works was organised by Amédée’s associate, Eugène Druet, in 1906 and included six works by Vincent still or once again, oddly enough, listed as belonging to Claude-Emile. All were for sale in the five German cities to which they travelled. This is a change of heart for Claude-Emile who had specified as early as the 1891 Salon des XX in Brussels, to which he lent Maus three of his most beautiful Gauguin vases, that “under no conditions should they be sold,” and as late as 1901, at the Berliner Secession, where the label on Vincent’s self-portrait “Man with a pipe” in Claude-Emile’s collection clearly stated that it was not for sale.
Connected with fake Van Goghs by the time of his death
By the time of his death, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker’s reputation had been tainted by association with his brother: “No one in Germany would have known him had his name not been mentioned again and again in different stories related to false Van Goghs [but] any lay person can easily distinguish Schuffenecker’s paintings from those of Van Gogh. The copies which came onto the art market, and were based on Van Gogh’s style of painting, originated presumably with his brother Amédée [..] To what extent there were grounds for the brothers to have been drawn into doing forgeries has never been established. It is nevertheless likely that a whole series of works painted by Amédée Schuffenecker are hanging today in the name of Van Gogh in a number of collections.” (Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Berlin, 26 August 1934).
We know, however, that Amédée was not a painter. His letterhead from May 1906 shows him to be a wine, cider and champagne merchant, residing at 2, place Rabelais in Meudon. But by 1907, the electoral list of Meudon lists him as a “courtier” (art objects, furniture, musical instruments) living at 10, rue des Pierres. Considering the fact that the two brothers never got along and rarely saw each other, it is difficult to explain a trip they would make together to Amsterdam in order to buy more of Vincent’s work from Johanna: a letter from Claude-Emile dated April 11, 1906 announces the proposed visit one week later. Johanna knew Claude-Emile had “always been a great admirer” of her brother-in-law but had still not met him despite some earlier correspondence.
Works drifted in and out of the two collections, especially in the eighteen years following Vincent’s death, moving from one brother to the other, and perhaps back again—a kind of shell-game which eventually included several other players: the poet and critic Julien Leclercq; Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld who financed the Rose + Croix Salon and the esoteric journal Le Cœur; historian, critic and collector Théodore Duret; art photographer and gallery owner Eugène Druet.
Further to complicate matters, Van Gogh’s paintings would travel extensively at a time when few appreciated, let alone could identify, them. The Schuffeneckers sold to Vollard; Claude-Emile’s first recorded Van Gogh sale was in December 1895. The most extensive activity between the two brothers and Vollard occurred throughout 1906, according to Vollard’s gallery diary, the very year they visited Johanna. It is an interesting reflection on Vollard’s character that Theo’s widow had rebuked him many times (and on 24 March 1896 for a seven-month delay of payment) for not keeping his word on conditions of the purchase of Vincent’s works. Amédée also sold works to Vollard during that period, including Cézanne’s famous “Grand arbre du lieu dit Montbriand” about which more shortly.
Of note is the fact that Vollard sold one of Vincent’s self-portraits and “soleils ds [dans] pot” to Antoine de la Rochefoucauld on 21 December 1896. The count did his own watercolour copy of these sunflowers almost immediately: twelve of them, as in the Philadelphia canvas, are shown in a ceramic vase with La Rochefoucauld’s dated signature at the bottom of the sheet of paper.
In a 17 May 1893 letter, he had stated his intention to reproduce a number of “the masterpieces” in Claude-Emile’s collection as supplements to Le Cœur. Among these, we recently discovered, was Vincent’s “Arlésienne” (the Orsay version), printed by Phototype Berthaud, Paris and labelled top right as belonging to the “Galerie de M Emile Schuffenecker.”
This is the second time the count mentions Schuffe-necker’s “gallery.” In the July 1894 issue of Le Cœur he writes, “And by Van Gogh! It is also [Claude-Emile] whose gallery has ‘L’Arlésienne’ [F489], ‘La moisson’ [F559/560/617?], ‘Les travailleurs du port’ [F838/837?], and a copy of a Daumier interpreted by Van Gogh [‘Les buveurs’ F667].”
Among other Van Goghs in his collection, Claude-Emile owned two different canvases showing “Les soleils” (the 1894 Philadelphia version of twelve purchased from Tanguy’s widow, and the Yasuda version of fourteen which had been noted by Leclercq in 1901), a “Portrait of Joseph Roulin” (F439), “The asylum at Arles” (F643), “The good Samaritan” (F633), “The peasant woman by the hearth” (F176), “Olive trees in Provence” (F585), and “Man with a pipe” (F529), one of his most prized possessions with which he painfully parted on 6 March 1902 when Gustave Fayet acquired it for FFr3000.
We are currently reconstituting the joint Schuffenecker collection. It is possible that both brothers may have had, at one time or another, as many as sixty pieces that are recorded in Van Gogh catalogues.
Jeanne Schuffenecker would inherit from both her father and her uncle on 1 September 1936 when Amédée died, leaving her FFr244,000 worth of art work (relatives testify that Jeanne’s apartment was, at this time, filled with about eighty paintings, as well as ceramics and wood sculptures), real estate and stock. Divorced twice and widowed once, Amédée’s three marriages produced no heirs. But in 1906 he did have a son, René, and in 1909, a daughter, Suzanne, by Zélie Aimable Thévenot (née Rispail) who was also married, with three children.
Amédée agreed to raise all five children, buying a home for his new family at 65, boulevard de la Pie in St Maur. At the same time, Claude-Emile was anxious to help his grandson, Roger, who had been born in 1903. Jeanne’s lover, six years younger, studied drawing with Schuffenecker, but never married her despite the fact that he remained a devoted friend of her father’s. Thus, both Claude-Emile and his brother faced unexpected family burdens that required increased financial support.
To the extent that Claude-Emile mourned the loss of his collection, he had not initially acquired it as a speculator: both Robert Rey and René Bruyez, from the Lycée Michelet where Schuffenecker taught, agree: “For sure his collection today would have attracted large numbers of collectors and represented an immense fortune, but in 1889, not at all.”
Only Dr René Puig supported Monfreid’s theory that Claude-Emile had systematically bought the new art in the hopes of profitable resale. This strikes us as out of character, although it is undeniable that the prudent Schuffenecker carefully salted away what he earned. His instincts to save infuriated Gauguin who considered him “tight.” But Claude-Emile had not only an extravagant daughter and grandson to look after; his ex-wife, otherwise impoverished and resentful, continued to live with him, at Jeanne’s pleading. How many innocent study copies had her father done out of admiration for the innovative techniques of another painter? It was not an uncommon practice. After all, the copy is not a forgery until it is deliberately promoted and sold as someone else’s work.
Copies (fakes?) of which we are aware
In our initial research on Schuffenecker, we were aware of Claude-Emile’s pastel copy of Vincent’s self-portrait now in the Van Gogh Museum; of his copy of Vincent’s “Poet’s garden in Arles;” of a strangely unfamiliar motif possibly taken from Van Gogh’s harvesters in a golden, Provençal wheat field; of a variation of Théodore Rousseau’s “Edge of the forest (Fontainebleau) at sunset;” copied in 1902 at the Louvre and reminiscent of only one other landscape of Schuffenecker’s; of a portrait at the Van Gogh Museum we thought might be Antoine de la Rochefoucauld and which a member of the family now believes to be of Antoine’s brother Hubert and possibly painted by both Claude-Emile and Hubert together; of a pencil sketch of Vincent’s “Arlésienne” that had been exhibited in Anthony d’Offay’s London gallery. There is Prud’hon’s “Divine Justice and Vengeance” or, more likely, Henner’s “The death of Bara,” for the model of Abel in Schuffenecker’s “Le premier meutre.”
Claude-Emile openly admitted touching up the hands in Cézanne’s painting of Mme Cézanne which he had bought (in a 1927 interview he claimed his intervention had been “knowingly admired”). Cé-zanne’s “Grand arbre du lieu dit Montbriand,” as well as a “Bassin du Jas de Bouffan” were also “completed.”
Schuffenecker did not want to be accused of “unspeakable tampering” with the work of other painters. One has only to look at the hundreds of oils in Schuffenecker’s corpus to realise that what he called his “Germanic” side often produced overworked, laboured canvases with none of Cézanne’s tempting white space nor Vincent’s “will of steel” (Waldemar George in Duret’s Albums d’ art, 1926), nor what Meier-Graefe sees as the “colossal combat of colours.” Why then attempt to reproduce what is so alien? Contradictions abound in the increasingly complicated personality we once thought so accessible, so easily dismissed.
Attracted to the new political, social and spiritual movements, Claude-Emile was equally seduced by the technique of his contemporaries who had left him behind: Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, Cézanne, Vincent; and in Gauguin’s case, the Mozart/Salieri dynamic. Aware that he would not be counted among the great Moderns. Schuffenecker sought to duplicate their energy, their vision, their passion. His hand proved nearly equal to the task but his temperament threatened to betray him.
Did the brother doctor the canvases?
Had Amédée taken Claude-Emile’s copies along with the rest of the collection, deliberately altering or adding signatures, and sold a first canvas as Vincent’s in Berlin, for example, instead of Paris where it could have more easily been compared to others, his brother’s silence would have been seen as complicity. Blackmail on the part of Amédée may have been the price for naming Jeanne his beneficiary, thus assuring the future security of Jeanne’s son, of whom Claude-Emile was so fond. An unwilling pact between two brothers who despised each other might explain the 1906 visit to Johanna. But most importantly, Claude-Emile, desirous of proving himself the equal of his fellow-artists, could demonstrate how easily label and provenance play into the hands of a buying public more anxious to invest in prestigious names than to look closely at a painting.
At about the same time (1903-1910) as Claude-Emile was writing hundreds of pages against France’s antiquated inheritance laws, supporting Jaurès’s radical social reforms, visiting labourers during strikes, and advocating women’s rights, the painstakingly slow process of generating copies-cum-forgeries for Amédée comes across as a militant act of defiance: had not Meier-Graefe said, during his testimony at the Wacker forgery trials, that whoever buys art works for exorbitant prices based solely on the faith of “experts” deserves whatever economic ruin befalls him. And had not Claude-Emile’s fury and disgust overwhelmed his student, Robert Rey in 1899 when, during a drawing critique, he called him a “little imbecile, a dirty little bourgeois,” and asked the rhetorical question: “Do you think it’s easy, when you hoped to be a Cézanne, a Van Gogh, or a Gauguin, to be reduced to correcting this garbage?”
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'The Van Gogh fakes: new revelations'