Allegory (1937-38), a painting hung at Newlyn in the late 1930s, was 8 ft x 4 ft, and the largest work of that year's exhibition. It is an anti-war allegory, last seen hanging on a stairway wall of a bombed-out house in the Midlands. Chapman was delighted to be in-touch with the Newlyn Art Gallery again in 1995 when the Diary of a Gallery was being collated for the Centennial celebrations. A witty and self-deprecating man, his paintings show him as an undoubted modernist working well before his time.

From a family where his mother and sisters were artists, he studied at Dulwich College and Byam Shaw School under Charles Ricketts.  He became interested in modern trends, moving towards the abstract after a Grand European Tour in 1934.  He states that collage noye was one of his inventions, and wrote for What's On in London for a quarter-century.