Born to a French mother and an English father, Charles Chaplin worked in France for his entire career and, though he continued to retain his English citizenship until 1886, considered himself French and actually spoke very little English. Chaplin took private lessons in the studio of the painter Michel-Martin Drolling before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts* in 1843.

He first exhibited at the Salon in 1845, showing a portrait of his mother, and continued to do so regularly, showing portraits, landscapes, genre subjects and floral still lifes. While his early work was in a more Realist vein, by the late 1850s he began to work in an elegant and graceful neo-Rococo manner reminiscent of the work of such artists as François Boucher, Je...