The painter and engraver Charles Chaplin was born in Les Andelys, France, the son of an English father and a French mother. After studying under Michel-Martin Drolling (1786-1851) and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his first works were portraits and landscapes in the Realist style. Eventually, however, he specialized in paintings of young women and children in the tradition of the English portraitists of the eighteenth century, but utilizing a soft and delicate palette more like that of the French Impressionists of his own time. Beginning in 1847, he exhibited at the Paris Salon, and, in 1849, the Royal Academy in London showed one of his paintings. Chaplin won prizes in Rome (1851, 1852, 1865), and was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1879. He painted large panels for the Salon des Fleurs and for the Suite of the Empress in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and a large canvas entitled The Dream for Prince Demidoff of Russia. Chaplin's works are in museums in Bayeux, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Rouen, Reims (Seated Woman), Mulhouse (Young Girl Sleeping and Woman with Rose), and Paris (Portrait of a Young Girl in the Musee du Luxembourg) in France; in London; and in New York (Haidee in The Metropolitan Museum of Art).