Marcel Thomas (1909-2000) - portrait de Charlie Chaplin - cachet de l'expert Gérard Gagnepain au verso

Very beautiful photograph of Marcel Thomas, depicting Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), British actor, director, and screenwriter, world-famous for his character Charlot. A major figure in silent cinema, he directed masterpieces such as Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and City Lights.

Marcel Thomas is a French photographer with an atypical career. It was after World War II that he settled in Paris, working in clothing manufacture. From 1947 to 1990, thanks to the help of doormen in the grand Parisian hotels, he photographed, with their consent, hundreds of French and international stars. He approached them with a friend who would ask for an autograph, then proposed that his companion take a photo of them; hence the posed rather than stolen aspect of these photographs.

Marcel Thomas took these photos as an amateur and did not commercialize them, but he accumulated several thousand. Shortly before his death in August 2000, he bequeathed his photos to his friend, the writer Gérard Gagnepain, whom he charged with making his collection known.