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Cleaning The Three Sisters, Elisabeth's face
A non-traditionalist
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Chaplin's artistic talent was in her genes, but she broke the mold in all ways. Chaplin's mother was a poet and sculptor and her grandfather, Charles Joshua Chaplin, was the French court painter and engraver. However, Chaplin’s artistic talents developed in nontraditional ways. As she nurtured no long-term master-apprentice relationships, she was a self-taught painter. When her family moved to Tuscany, Chaplin began copying the works on view at the Uffizi Gallery, taking her place among the ranks of historic women copyists who also trained in the gallery. In 1921, her first work was featured at the Paris Salon, a government- sponsored event founded in the 1730s. During the 1920s, she exhibited with Cezanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh, showing her work twice at Venice Biennale, in 1924 and 1926. In 1937, Chaplin received the gold medal at Paris’s World Fair. Amongst many artistic trends and movements, Elisabeth Chaplin stayed true to her own style while cultivating a link to European Symbolism, which ‘tends to investigate a subjective world of emotions, fantasies, and dreams’ (Grigorian).