Charles S. Chapman was brought up in upstate New York on the St. Lawrence River. He attended the Ogdensburg Free Academy there, before coming to New York, where he entered Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He then studied at William Merritt Chase's Chase School of Art and the Art Students League, under J. Carroll Beckwith, W. Appleton Clark, and Luis F. Mora.
He early established a friendship with Frederic Remington, and it was Remington's advice when they were together in Bermuda-that he should study what he loved and then paint it-that Chapman credited as focusing his career. He proceeded to spend the year 1902-3 in a Canadian logging camp working as a culler, the experience from which much of his ensuing work derived. In this early period Chapman also worked as an illustrator, publishing drawings in Century, Scribner's, and Pictorial Review.
In 1908 he settled in the artists' colony in Leonia, New Jersey, sharing a studio with Howard McCormick. Among other artists active in Leonia were Arthur Covey, Harvey Dunn, Grant Reynard, Harry Wickey, and Mahonri Young. Chapman married Adele Blanche Ahrens of Leonia in 1911. For the first ten years of married life, the Chapmans summered near Winsted, Connecticut; after Chapman's father died they summered in Morristown, New York.
Chapman was a master at many media. He developed a technique he called water-oil, which involved creating his design in thinned oil colors floated on a surface of water and then laying paper on surface, absorbing the oil color. Examples of these works were exhibited at the Grand Central Art Galleries, New York. He also worked on mural scale, executing several commissions for the American Red Cross during World War I; a thirty-by-thirty-foot landscape of the Grand Canyon as background for a display of pumas at the American Museum of Natural History, New York; and in 1940 Captain Bilderbook's and John Schoolcraft's Expedition from Hollidays Cove to Fort Wheeling, 1777 for the post office in Hollidays Cove, West Virginia.
Chapman taught at the Art Students League (1914-18 and 1936-40). He also taught at the Montclair (N.J.) Art Museum, for a brief period at an art school he started with Harvey Dunn in Leonia, and in his own studio. During the summer of 1941 he taught art at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.
He supplied five drawings to illustrate The School of a Thousand Stories, a promotional pamphlet on its school that the National Academy of Design published in 1925; in 1952 he donated the original drawings to the Academy. Chapman lectured on perspective at the school from 1929 to 1936 and taught landscape painting during the 1948-49 session. He was elected to a three-year term on the Academy Council in 1927 and promptly invented and introduced for use at meetings an electronic voting machine. In 1932 he was returned to the Council and the next year was elected the Academy's recording secretary, a post he held until 1942. As a participant in Academy annual exhibitions, Chapman was awarded the Saltus Medal for Merit in 1917 and 1940, the Andrew Carnegie Prize in 1921 and 1938, and a Benjamin Altman Prize in 1924.
