Charles Dix attended Union College, Schenectady, New York, but only for a year. His promise and predilection for a career in art was so pronounced that, reportedly, the president of the college advised him forego a formal education for one in art. In the winter of 1857 he was in Philadelphia, spending only three months as a student of the marine painter Edward Moran. By the spring of that year, when he made his debut in the Academy annual exhibition with a marine painting lent by its owner, he was living in New York. Among the five paintings he showed in the annual of 1858 was A Headland at the Bay of Fundy, lent by Moran; this would suggest that Dix had traveled along the Northeast coast at least as far as the Canadian border as well as that he had a positive relationship with his former teacher. In 1859 he made a sketching trip to Gibraltar, which yielded paintings that attracted considerable attention. In the usual pattern of establishing a reputation, Dix sent his paintings to a wide range of venues: they were seen annually in the Troy (N.Y.) Young Men's Association exhibitions from 1859 through 1862; in 1860 at the exhibitions of the Artists' Fund Society, New York, the Western Academy in Saint Louis, and the Washington (D.C.) Art Association; and in 1861 at the Boston Athenaeum exhibition. His work also continued to appear annually, and in quantity, at Academy shows through 1861. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Dix took a commission as first lieutenant in the Fourteenth U.S. Regular Infantry, the regiment in which his grandfather had served, and which his father, General John A. Dix, commanded. He was assigned to his father's staff.
In 1865, immediately after the war, Dix went abroad and resumed his career as a painter. He sailed to Barcelona and from there went to Rome. For the remainder of his brief life he essentially divided his time between Rome and London, spending summers in Capri, Italy, the Channel Islands, and on the coast of Cornwall in England. Within the year of Dix's arrival in Europe his father was appointed to the American Embassy, Paris; at the time of his son's death in 1873, John Dix was governor of New York.
Dix's abandonment of artistic pursuits in favor of military service accounts for his failure to complete within the time limit the Academy requirement to confirm election as Associate. Despite his acknowledged talent (Henry Tuckerman, writing in 1867, described Dix as an artist "of rare promise"), because Dix was living abroad and did not again exhibit with the Academy until 1870 and 1871, the members were probably in no haste to reelect him.
