Charles CHAPLIN (1825-1891) ✿

Charles Joshua Chaplin (8 June 1825–30 January 1891) was a French painter and engraver. His father was English and his mother French, and he only became a naturalized Frenchman in 1886, although he worked in France all his life. He was a pupil at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1840, and he regularly visited the studio of Michel-Martin Drolling, whose pupils included Paul Baudry, Jean-Jacques Henner and Jules Breton. In 1845 he entered the Salon as a portrait and landscape painter with his Portrait of the Artist's Mother (untraced). His early works, from 1848 to 1851, are characterized by a concern for realism which had been restored to fashion by the Second Republic: he painted the landscape of the Auvergne, showing a regionalism that is found also, for example, in works by Adolphe Leleux and Armand Leleux. Chaplin soon rejected this early manner in favour of a more supple and gracious style that ensured him fame as a portrait painter.