Elisabeth Chaplin

Élisabeth Chaplin (17 October 1890 – 28 January 1982) was a French/Tuscan painter in the Nabis style.

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.

Family influences

Chaplin came from a family of painters and sculptors. Her mother was Marguerite de Bavier-Chauffour, a poet and sculptor. Her uncle was Charles Joshua Chaplin, a French painter and engraver. 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.

She participated in the Venice Biennale in 1914 and in the Paris Salon in 1922 and thereafter. She befriended French author André Gide and followed painter Maurice Denis, founder of the Nabis movement, whom she met in Florence in 1912. Her nephew Robert Chaplin, a young and promising artist, lived with them from 1927 until his death from muscular dystrophy at age eleven in 1937.

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. In 1937, she won a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Paris and in 1938, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor.

Return to Tuscany

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).

Several of her works are on display in the national Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

Chaplin donated her entire body of works (and those of her mother and nephew) to Florence. 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.