Young Girl with a Cat

Charles Joshua Chaplin made a career out of exactly this kind of picture, a young girl with a cat, soft and charming and gently coloured. He was French despite the English name, and he became one of the favourite painters of fashionable Paris under the Second Empire, in the 1850s and 1860s, when a taste for delicate, decorative images of women and children was at its height. He decorated private rooms and salons in that mode, and he taught a number of young women artists at a time when the official academy still kept its classes closed to them. A subject like a girl playing with a cat let him show off the light touch and powdery colour his patrons wanted. He worked in Paris until his death in 1891.