Study for "Seaweed Gatherers, Yport" (c. 1888): Art, History and Details

Study for "Seaweed Gatherers, Yport" (c. 1888) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Claude-Emile Schuffenecker (French, 1851–1934).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Claude-Emile Schuffenecker worked closely with Paul Gauguin to form Synthetism, a style of art that broke from Impressionism in favor of flat planes of bold color and invented subjects. This drawing is a study for one of Schuffenecker’s most important works, Seaweed Gatherers, Yport, which exists in two versions, one of which belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The other version of the drawing (owned by the Art Institute of Chicago) was featured in an influential 1889 exhibition organized by Gauguin and Schuffenecker at the Café Volpini on the grounds of the Universal Exposition. Both artists saw imagery of seaweed gatherers—a task undertaken by working class people in rural French coastal towns—as exemplifying the simplicity they sought in their art.

Object facts

• Title: Study for "Seaweed Gatherers, Yport"
• Date: c. 1888
• Creator attribution: Claude-Emile Schuffenecker (French, 1851–1934)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk on laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 47.6 x 31.3 cm (18 3/4 x 12 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2020.289

A detail from the museum

Claude-Emile Schuffenecker met Paul Gauguin while the two were working at the same Parisian stockbrokerage. They both abandoned their jobs to become professional artists following a market crash in 1882.

Collection credit

Elizabeth Carroll Shearer Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Margin and Image. Exh. Cat. New York: University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1980.
• Grossvogel, Jill-Elyse. Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Catalogue Raisonné. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 2000).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.