Émile Schuffenecker

Émile Schuffenecker is one of those figures who mattered most for what he made possible for others. Born in 1851, he worked for years as a broker on the Paris exchange, where he became close friends with a colleague named Paul Gauguin, and the two left business for painting at roughly the same time. Schuffenecker settled into a steady life as a drawing teacher and collector while Gauguin went the harder road.

His moment came in 1889. During the great World's Fair in Paris, Gauguin and his circle could not get into the official art shows, and it was Schuffenecker who arranged a room for them in a café run by a Monsieur Volpini on the fairground. That hanging, later called the Volpini exhibition, was the first real public showing of Gauguin's Synthetist group.

He was also an early buyer of Vincent van Gogh, which shadowed his reputation after his death. From the late 1920s some experts suspected that Schuffenecker, a skilled copyist with Van Goghs in his hands, had retouched or even faked pictures. Nothing was proven, and the question still hangs over certain canvases, including a famous version of the Sunflowers.