It is testament to both his eminence as an artist and his importance as a teacher that Charles Joshua Chaplin (1825-1891) became one of the most imitated Academic painters of the early Belle Époque. In the final quarter of the 19th century few artists of the traditional French Academic School retained as much respect amongst their contemporaries and students as Chaplin. His elegant pictures, (by then unfashionably) reminiscent of the Rococo portraiture of the Ancien Régime, were enthusiastically copied by pupils as routinely as those of his famous contemporaries William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). Many of these copies – of varying quality – remain in circulation today but, despite being regularly sold by European and North American auction houses as the work of Chaplin himself, are easily identified as counterfeit by anyone familiar with the real thing.
Genuine examples of Charles Joshua Chaplin’s Belle Epoque portraiture
Charles Joshua Chaplin (1825-1891) entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1845, and alongside fellow pupils Paul Baudry (1828-1886) and Jules Breton (1827-1906) studied in the studio of the distinguished French history painter Michel Martin Drolling (1786-1851). In 1851, Chaplin was awarded a medal at the Paris Salon for a painting of his sister and was subsequently inundated with commissions from the Parisian aristocracy for portraits of wives and daughters. The contemporary art critic, Frédéric Loliée, wrote that…
“Chaplin has renewed, but with less artifice, the delicacies of our (François) Boucher. The portraits of women always lit up with charming colours…captivate you, they seduce you.”
And even one of the great fathers of Impressionism, Édouard Manet, admitted that Chaplin knew “the smile of a woman”.
Of all his admirers and patrons, the most important (and useful) was the wife of Napoleon III, Empress Eugénie who appointed Chaplin an official artist of the French court. In 1859, when Chaplin’s portrait ‘Aurora’ was banned by the judges of the Salon des Artistes Français for being “too erotically suggestive” it was the intervention of Napoleon and Eugénie that had the disqualification order overturned, enabling the painting to be included in the exhibition and no doubt boosting the artist’s reputation at the same time.
Charles Chaplin’s popularity didn’t prevent him from setting aside a considerable amount of his time to teaching. From his Paris studio Chaplin oversaw the artistic training of countless students including many who would go on to achieve fame in their own right, including two of the most important female painters of the fin de siècle and Edwardian era, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) and Louise Jopling (1843-1933).
To his great credit Chaplin was the first French artist to actively encourage female students. His enlightened classes – open exclusively to female students – predated even those of his equally egalitarian contemporaries William Bouguereau and Carolus-Duran (1837-1917). Whilst it is largely overlooked today, it wasn’t the much-vaunted Impressionist avant-garde furthering the cause of female painters in Belle Époque Paris but an establishment figure like Charles Chaplin, and this, a full 30 years before women artists were allowed into the Ecole des Beaux Arts to even study.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting of the all-female art class in the studio of Tony Robert-Fleury in 1880, the first year in which women were allowed to enter the Académie Julian in Paris
As belle as the époque might have been for the likes Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec (aside from the syphilis), it was very much less so for any young female artist hoping to be taken seriously in Paris during the final decades of the 19th century. There were, of course, plenty of women to be found in the garrets of Montmartre but they were invariably the painted rather than the painter. But thanks to Chaplin, for the first time, the likes of Mary Cassatt and Louise Jopling, as well as Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883) and Louise Abbéma (1853-1927) were able to gain access to a professional artist’s atelier without having to enter through the bedroom.
Self portraits of Mary Cassatt, Louise Abbéma and Louise Jopling, all pupils of Chaplin.
Anyone still in any doubt as to the prevailing attitude to female artists at the time need only to read the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who in 1880 wrote…
“What more can we expect from women if you consider that the most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the Fine Arts that is really great, genuine, and original… they have not a single great painting to boast of, because they are deficient in that objectivity of mind which is so directly indispensable in painting.”
Oh dear. Herr Schopenhauer’s thoughts on Ethics and Metaphysics may have been a whiz-bang, but I think it’s fair to say he was less strong on the subject of Women.
Contrary to what most people today would assume, the majority of the casual misogyny and intellectual sexism in the art world of Belle Epoque Paris wasn’t to be found in the person or pictures of ‘establishment’ figures like Chaplin, but on the walls of the Salon des Refusés. We’re always hearing how much Degas, Gauguin, and Picasso “loved women” but whilst I have no doubt they loved having sex with them I am less sure that they respected them like Chaplin clearly did.
During his lifetime Charles Joshua Chaplin was awarded numerous medals at the Paris Salon and in 1865 he was declared a Chevalier and later Officer of la Légion d’Honneur (1881). Today, works by Chaplin are held in the collections of the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
by Gavin Claxton
© Academy Fine Paintings Ltd 2023
Images courtesy of Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams.