Antoine de La Rochefoucauld

The year on this portrait is 1886, which catches the sitter just before the part of his life he is remembered for. Antoine de La Rochefoucauld was 23, a count who had done his service as an infantry officer and had turned to painting. Six years later he paid for the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, the mystical exhibition Joséphin Péladan staged in Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris, and he went on to fund a small monthly review called Le Cœur and to keep painters like Charles Filiger and Émile Bernard in money. The painter, Émile Schuffenecker, was a former stockbroker turned drawing teacher and one of the founders of the independent artists' society in 1884, which is the world the two of them shared. La Rochefoucauld outlasted all of it. He painted Erik Satie's portrait in 1894 and died in 1959, aged 96.