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Chaplin, Charles Joshua (1825–1891)
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, favourite artist of the Empress Eugénie, decorator of the Tuileries and the Élysée, and the most sought-after society portraitist of the Second Empire. He was also the teacher of Mary Cassatt.
| 1825 | 1845 | 1859 | 1866 | 1891 |
| Born at Les Andelysin Normandy | Salon debuta portrait of his mother | Aurora bannedthe Emperor lifts the ban | Mary Cassatt enrolsin his atelier for women | Dies in Parisaged sixty-five |
The master who taught Mary Cassatt · painter to the Empress Eugénie
Louvre / Metropolitan / Hermitage / Bowes Museum
A listed artist
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. He was a complete technician, working in oil, pastel, watercolour, chalk, lithography and etching.
He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1845 to the end of his life, a run of forty-six years, and the Empress Eugénie entrusted him with decorative schemes at the Tuileries, the Élysée and the Opéra Garnier.
An Englishman at Les Andelys
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 Adèle Moisy was French, and although he lived his entire life in France he remained legally English until his naturalisation in 1886, five years before his death.
Aurora, 1859
He 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 Lozère. Around 1851 he turned decisively to the subject that made his name, women, painted in harmonies of white, grey and rose with a charm contemporaries compared to Boucher.
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 Napoleon III himself overturned. The Empress Eugénie became his champion.
The Atelier for Women
His most lasting contribution may be his teaching. At a time when women were barred from the École des Beaux-Arts, he ran classes for them at his own studio, and through it passed a remarkable generation. The American Mary Cassatt, who studied with him in 1866 before joining the Impressionists. Eva Gonzalès, his pupil from 1866 to 1868 and later the only formal student of Manet. Louise Abbéma, Madeleine Lemaire, and the English painter Louise Jopling. Chaplin trained two of the four great women of the Impressionist generation.
He married Marie Antoinette Jeanne Ruttre in 1862, and of their five children, Arthur Chaplin also became a painter. He died in Paris on 30 January 1891, aged sixty-five, and is buried at Père Lachaise beneath a tomb by the sculptor Denys Puech.
Recognising a Chaplin
The signature subjects are young women in harmonies of white, grey and rose, painted with a soft brush and a pearly palette. Beyond them come genre scenes and, occasionally, animals, handled with exactly the same touch as his sitters. Works are signed "Ch. Chaplin", often with the date.
One caution. He is not the only Chaplin in the market. Works are sometimes confused with those of his son Arthur Chaplin (1869-1935), also a painter, and the name inevitably attracts searches meant for the film comedian. Period, subject and signature settle it.
Where to See His Work
Chaplin hangs in 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.
Biographical information compiled from museum records and published artist reference sources, including Bénézit. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
