[2] As "T", he was one of the artists responsible for occasional caricatures of Vanity Fair magazine, specializing in French and Italian subjects.

His work for Vanity Fair included Pope Leo XIII, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Umberto I of Italy, William Henry Waddington, all in 1878, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Ernest Renan, Jules Grévy, Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, Marshal MacMahon, Granier de Cassagnac, Louis Blanc, and Alexandre Dumas fils, all in 1879.

Among Chartran's work is his portrait of René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope, Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, Benoît-Constant Coquelin, the Maharaja of Kapurthala and the Countess of Maupeou.

[5] In 1899, Henry Clay Frick commissioned Chartran to create a painting of the scene when the peace protocol at the close of the Spanish–American War was signed in the Cabinet Room.

[11] When family members called it the "Mewing Cat" for making him look so harmless, he had it destroyed and hired John Singer Sargent to paint a more masculine portrait.

[12] Chartran was married to a woman who "descended from a famous family" and was "gifted with a voice of sweetness and considerable power and possessed of strong lyric ambition, which, however, she did not gratify by a career on the stage.