His mother was a descendant of Victor de Lanneau [fr], restorer of the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris; of Juliette Adam, founder of a French paper, La Nouvelle Revue, and muse of Léon Gambetta and the spiritual mother of Pierre Loti.

Oriane de La Panouse, the countess of Paris, the Harcourt, Brantes, Faucigny-Lucinge, Seillière, Broglie, Pourtalès, Maillé, Montesquiou, Wendel families were amongst his clients.

Claude Rivière stated that Fourneau was the opposite of being a fashionable painter: "A great admirer of Antonin Artaud, of Paulhan, and of Aragon, the artist, with a fervour born of all the existential interstices due to his being, will first and foremost clash with his model.

"[9] Fourneau appeared in a photograph of surrealist artists gathered at the Café Cyrano in 1953,[10] and André Breton mentioned him as being part of the group.

[12] "As if l'amour fou, 'elected love' could not find better fulfillment than through the paradoxical game of the resolution of opposites: pleasure and pain, violence and gentleness, libertinism and fidelity, strength and weakness..."[clarify] On his return to Paris in 1968, Jean-Claude Fourneau resumed portrait painting, and his last exhibition was held in 1976.