Still Life with Lobster on a White Tablecloth

In 1851 the town council of Le Havre voted Eugène Boudin, then a young local painter, a grant to spend three years studying in Paris. He used much of it at the Louvre as a copyist, and he openly admired the still lifes of Chardin, the 18th-century French master of kitchen tables and plain objects. Boudin began painting still lifes of his own in 1853, and the High Museum dates this one to around 1853 to 1856. Everything the genre asked for is here: a red lobster on a white dish, a crab and a few shrimps, a knife across a crumpled cloth, a blue-and-white jar, a glass carafe and a dark bottle. Boudin called pictures like this dining-room paintings, made for the walls of middle-class homes, and he went on selling them for years to supplement his income.