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Biography · French School
Charles Joshua Chaplin
1825 to 1891
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, a favorite of the Empress Eugénie and the most sought-after society portraitist of the Second Empire. He was also the teacher of Mary Cassatt.
Original Charles Chaplin Paintings for Sale
White, Gray and Rose
He painted a puppy with the brush he kept for the ladies of the Empire.
His signature subjects are young women in harmonies of white, gray and rose, laid in with a soft brush and a pearly palette that his contemporaries compared to Boucher. Animals come rarely in his work, and when they do they are handled with exactly the same touch as his sitters.
Who Trained Charles Chaplin
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts around 1840 and trained in the studio of Michel Martin Drolling, whose other pupils included Paul Baudry, Jules Breton and Jean-Jacques Henner.
His teacher
The painter
His pupil
Click a number on the map or a place to read what happened there.
An Englishman in Second Empire Paris
The Life of Charles Joshua Chaplin, Place by Place
Born in Normandy to an English father and a French mother, he lived his whole life in France and remained legally English until 1886, five years before his death.
He is born here, in Normandy, in 1825.
He shows at the Salon from 1845. In 1859 the Emperor lifts the ban on his Aurora, and in his own studio he teaches women barred from the École des Beaux-Arts, Mary Cassatt among them. He dies here in 1891.
- 1825Born at Les Andelysin Normandy
- 1845Salon debuta portrait of his mother
- 1859Aurora bannedthe Emperor lifts the ban
- 1866Mary Cassatt enrollsin his atelier for women
- 1891Dies in Parisaged sixty-five
Stories about Chaplin
1 of 2
The painting the Emperor saved.
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. Napoleon III himself overturned the order, and the Empress Eugénie became his champion.
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