Charles Joshua Chaplin

In the Paris of the Second Empire, the official art school, the École des Beaux-Arts, did not admit women. Charles Joshua Chaplin ran a private studio that did. Among the young foreigners who studied with him in the 1860s was an American, Mary Cassatt, who would later exhibit alongside the Impressionists.

Chaplin himself was half English. Born at Les Andelys in Normandy in 1825 to an English father and a French mother, he held both nationalities, and trained in Paris partly under Michel Martin Drolling, a strict pupil of the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. What made his name was far softer than that schooling: pastels and oils of young women in gauzy dress, all powder and daydream, exactly to the taste of the imperial court. The Empress Eugénie admired him, and he was given decorative work in the Tuileries and Élysée palaces.

That delicacy got him into trouble at least once, when one of his canvases of drowsy young women was refused by the Salon as too suggestive. He went on painting the same world of feminine leisure for 30 more years, in pastel, watercolour, and etching, and died in Paris in 1891 having made so many that his work still turns up regularly at auction.