Until the 1966 retrospective of his work at two museums in France, Schuffenecker was best known for his close relationship with Gauguin, van Gogh, Pissarro, Bernard, and Redon, as well as for organizing the famous Volpini Exhibition of Synthetist Art as an alternative to the official Salon at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. His initial academic painting under Carolus-Duran and Baudry passed through an intermediary divisionist stage strongly influenced by Seurat and Monet. After 1892, his work consists of mystical, dream-like compositions reflecting his involvement with the Rose + Croix Salon and the Theosophical movement. This double portrait of the avant-garde art critic for the Mercure de France, Julien Leclercq, a close friend of the artist, and his wife, the Finnish pianist Fannie Flodin, is a fine example of Schuffenecker’s delicate and idealizing images during the symbolist period between 1892 and 1900 in which he struggled "for art and the ideal." Typified by flowing lines and softened color fields, subtle and sensitive portraits such as this one reveal the artist as a skilled draftsman and pastellist. Leclercq was, like Schuffenecker, one of the first French collectors of van Gogh’s paintings, and, with the help of Theo van Gogh’s widow in 1901, mounted the first retrospective of Vincent’s work at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. Fannie Flodin Leclercq, being Scandinavian, had facilitated the 1898 traveling exhibition of Schuffenecker, van Gogh, Gauguin, Vuillard, Sérusier, Maufra, Guillaumin, and Rodin in Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm.