Background
Her mother was Marguerite de Bavier-Chauffour, a poet and sculptor.
Her mother was Marguerite de Bavier-Chauffour, a poet and sculptor.
She is known for her portraiture and Tuscan landscapes, most of which reside in the Pitti Palace’s Gallery of Modern Art collection in Florence. She has two self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor collection. Chaplin came from a family of painters and sculptors.
Charles Chaplin conducted art classes specifically for women at his studio.
The American artist Mary Cassatt and the English artist Louise Jopling were among Charles Chaplin"s students. He died when Elisabeth Chaplin was a baby.
In 1900 Elisabeth’s family moved to Italy, first to Piemonte and afterwards to Savona in Liguria. lieutenant was there that she started to teach herself to paint, with no formal training.
When the Chaplin family took up residence at the Villa Rossi in Fiesole in 1905, Elisabeth had the chance to visit Francesco Gioli’s studio and meet painter Giovanni Fattori.
Chaplin’s visits to the Uffizi Museum were decisive. She learned from copying the classics. In 1916 she moved with her family to Rome, where she would live until 1922.
There she met Paul-Albert Besnard (1849-1934), a French painter and printmaker, who in 1913, was appointed to be the director of Villa Medici in Rome.
He became one of Chaplin’s mentors. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 1914 and in the Paris Salon in 1922 and thereafter.
Chaplin produced numerous portraits and frescoes during this time. She socialized with painters Giovanni Fattori and Luigi and Francesco Gioli, and art collector Bernard Bereson.
From the mid 1930s until the early 1950s, Chaplin lived in Paris.
She received civil commissions to produce decorative tapestries such as Summer and Autumn for the École Professionelle of Metz, France (1936-1937) and murals for Paris churches Notre-Dame-du Salut and Saint-Esprit. She returned to Villa Il Treppiede in Fiesole after the war and moved back permanently in the early 1950s. She continued to paint landscapes and portraits, many of family members and loved ones.
In 1946, the Uffizi Gallery acquired three of her paintings and requested a donation from the artist of her young Self-portrait with a Green Umbrella that now hangs in the Vasari Corridor.
During her lifetime there a number of major retrospectives in Florence of her work: Palazzo Strozzi (1946), Academy of Arts and Design (1956), and French Institute (1965). Fifteen of her paintings are on show at Palazzo Pitti’s Modern Art Gallery, while almost 700 (paintings and sketches) are in storage.
She died in Fiesole in 1982.
From 1905-1908, she painted her first large canvases and in 1910 her "Ritratto di Famiglia" (Family Portrait) won a gold medal from the Florence Society of Fine Arts (displayed in the Gallery of Modern Art, Florence). She befriended French author André Gide and followed painter Maurice Denis, founder of the Nabis movement, whom she met in Florence in 1912. In 1937, she won a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Paris and in 1938, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor.
