The son of a sailor, Eugène Boudin spent his youth at Honfleur on the Normandy coast and then in the port of Le Havre, where his family settled in 1835. Although Boudin thought of his still lifes as nothing more than “dining room pictures,” these works have an impressive, somber nobility. They are also historically significant, since it was due to Boudin’s example that Monet painted still lifes in the 1850s, and the Impressionists would continue the interest in this subject. Rather than adopting the Impressionist manner of rendering atmosphere and objects in flickering strokes, however, Boudin remained devoted to the objective realism that had been his original style.