Claude-Émile SCHUFFENECKER (Fresne-Saint-Mamès, 1851 - Paris, 1934) Portrait of Emile Bernard, 1889 Grease pencil and pastel. Stamp of the studio in the lower left corner. Titled and signed on the back. 50 x 37 cm Provenance : - Jeanne Schuffenecker, daughter of the artist. - Galerie Georges Martin du Nord. - Collection Arthur G. Altschul (1920-2002), banker, acquired from the former on April 29, 1966. Exhibition : - Emile Schuffenecker: an unknown, Galerie Berri-Raspail, Paris, 1944, No. 6. - Galerie Sélection, Tunis (before 1956). - Gauguin og Hans Venner, Galerie Winkel and Magnussen, Copenhagen, 1956, No. 109. - Le Groupe de Pont-Aven, Galerie Mons, Paris, 1962, n° 10 bis. - Claude-Émile Schuffenecker: Margin and Image, Binghamton, University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, Hammer galleries, 1980, n° 18. - Émile Schuffenecker, Pont-Aven, museum, 1996, n° 53. Bibliography: - Arts, April 1981, vol. 55, no. 8, p. 31 reproduced. - R. Porro, Claude-Émile Schuffenecker 1851-1934, Combeaufontaine, 1992, reproduced p. 146. - Jill-Elyse Grossvogel, Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, San Francisco, 2000, no. 49, reproduced on p. 20. This drawing illustrates the relationship between Schuffenecker and Émile Bernard at a time when both artists were immersed in the idealist atmosphere, probably in 1892. Bernard exhibited at the first Salon de la Rose+Croix and Schuffenecker collaborated with Bernard in the magazines Le Coeur and L'Ymagier. Schuffenecker soon adhered to the theosophy of Helene Blavatsky and remained close to Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, patron of Peladan and later a defender of the Synthetists. This context is not indifferent to the character of Bernard's portrait, with its inspired look and spiritualized physiognomy. There is a pencil drawing (Grossvogel no. 48) close to our portrait, while the definitive oil painting (fig.1), integrates the model in an interior setting (Houston, Fine Arts Museum). As in the portraits of Jules Bois and Julien Leclerc, Schuffenecker here idealizes the face and stylizes the model to suggest his vision of the artist as much as that of the man. In spite of a true resemblance, we see that Schuffenecker draws this effigy towards an ideal of the artist that we find in many idealist profiles. Jean Dampt, painted by Dagnan-Bouveret, the self-portraits of Alphonse Osbert, Armand Point or Lévy-Dhurmer, for example, have, beyond their physical singularity, something of this Émile Bernard, interiorized but proud, sober but present to the world. A few years earlier, in 1888, it was Émile Bernard who had painted Schuffenecker's portrait, in profile in his studio and just as hieratic, which Vanier used on the cover of Hommes d'aujourd'hui in 1891, as well as that of the artist's wife, pensive, turning away from a window; Schuffenecker, for his part, had taken Madame Bernard mère as his model in 1890, attesting to the close ties that united the two families. The simplicity of Schuffenecker's drawing, for which he has sometimes been criticized, is paradoxically well suited to the portrait of an idealized Émile Bernard; as with his Jules Bois, the artist goes to the heart of the matter and captures an icon of the period among the young heroes of the Symbolist adventure.