Chaplin, Charles Joshua (1825–1891)
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Biography
Early life
Long before the name belonged to a man with a bowler hat and a cane, Charles Chaplin was one of the most fashionable painters in Paris. Charles Joshua Chaplin was the favourite artist of the Empress Eugenie, the decorator of the Tuileries and the Elysee palaces, and the most sought-after society portraitist of the Second Empire. He was also, and this matters greatly to American collectors, the teacher of Mary Cassatt.
He was born on 8 June 1825 at Les Andelys in Normandy, the same Seine-side town whose mills Peraire would later paint. His father, John Chaplin, was an English art broker; his mother, Olympe Adele Moisy, was French. Though he lived his entire life in France, he remained legally English until his naturalisation in 1886, five years before his death. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris around 1840 and trained in the studio of Michel Martin Drolling, whose other pupils included Paul Baudry, Jules Breton and Jean-Jacques Henner.
From Auvergne landscapes to the boudoir
Chaplin made his Salon debut in 1845 with a portrait of his mother, and spent his first years as a naturalist, painting sober landscapes of the Auvergne and the Lozere. Around 1851 he turned decisively to the subject that made his name: women. His portraits of young women, painted in harmonies of white, grey and rose with a charm that contemporaries compared to Boucher, made him the painter of feminine elegance in Second Empire Paris.
Success came with a whiff of scandal. In 1859 his Aurora was judged too daring by the Salon jury and banned from exhibition by the comte de Nieuwerkerke, superintendent of fine arts, an order that Napoleon III himself overturned. The Empress Eugenie became his champion, commissioning paintings and entrusting him with decorative schemes at the Tuileries palace, the Elysee and the Opera Garnier.
Charles Joshua Chaplin, Portrait of a Labrador Puppy, signed and dated 1882, oil on mahogany panel. GalerieClub Fine Art.
The teacher of Mary Cassatt
Chaplin's most lasting contribution to art history may be his teaching. At a time when women were barred from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he ran art classes specifically for women at his studio. Through that studio passed a remarkable generation: the American Mary Cassatt, who studied with him in 1866 before joining the Impressionists; Eva Gonzales, his pupil from 1866 to 1868 and later the only formal student of Manet; Louise Abbema, Madeleine Lemaire, the English painter Louise Jopling, and many others. For collectors who love the Impressionists, Chaplin is the master who trained two of the movement's four great women painters.
He married Marie Antoinette Jeanne Ruttre in 1862; of their five children, Arthur Chaplin also became a painter. Chaplin exhibited at the Salon from 1845 to the end of his life and died in Paris on 30 January 1891. He is buried at Pere Lachaise, beneath a tomb by the sculptor Denys Puech.
Style, subjects and the market
Chaplin was a complete technician, working in oil, pastel, watercolour, chalk, lithography and etching. Beyond the celebrated portraits, he painted genre scenes and, on occasion, animals, handled with the same soft brush and pearly palette as his sitters. Our signed panel of a Labrador puppy, dated 1882, shows this rarer side of his production: the intimate Chaplin, painting for pleasure at the height of his fame.
Legacy
His works are held at the Louvre, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Bowes Museum in England, and the French museums of Bordeaux, Bayonne, Bourges, Mulhouse, Reims and Rouen, among others. On the market he remains one of the most reliably traded academic names of the Second Empire, with a particular following in the United States, where the Cassatt connection keeps his name in every survey of American Impressionism. Every work offered by GalerieClub Fine Art ships free to the United States and Canada.
Timeline
1825 Born 8 June at Les Andelys, Normandy, to an English father and a French mother.
c. 1840 Enters the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the studio of Michel Martin Drolling.
1845 Salon debut with a portrait of his mother. Early career devoted to naturalist landscapes of the Auvergne and Lozere.
1851 Turns to the female portrait and genre scenes that make his reputation.
1859 His Aurora is banned from the Salon as too daring; Napoleon III lifts the ban.
1860s Favourite painter of the Empress Eugenie. Decorates the Tuileries, the Elysee and the Opera Garnier. Marries Marie Antoinette Jeanne Ruttre in 1862.
1866 Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzales study in his women's atelier.
1882 Paints the signed and dated Portrait of a Labrador Puppy now in our collection.
1886 Naturalised French, after a lifetime in France.
1891 Dies in Paris on 30 January. Buried at Pere Lachaise.
