'Perched Parrot with Fruit', still life painting by Eugène Boudin

The present painting depicts a still life of fruit with a parrot. The composition is set outdoors—and was likely painted en plein air, an act for which the artist, Eugène Boudin, was particularly famous—and is centred with a stone ledge, atop of which is placed a bowl laden with peaches. The ledge is bedecked with an abundance of fruit, including grapes and melons, which spills over its edge into the near foreground, where a basket of pears, watermelons, and artichokes sit. On the ledge, a parrot perches, eyeing the bountiful fruit. The background is painted diffusely with a distant treeline and a blue sky. The painterly manner is fluid and impressionistic, while the colour palette is bright and vibrant, with unadulterated colours—especially greens and oranges—predominating.

The painting is by the nineteenth-century French artist Eugène Boudin. Boudin was one of the first French painters to take to painting en plein air—that is, out of doors, in the full glare of daylight and breadth of nature—and is best known today for his Northern French coastal landscapes, particularly of his native Honfleur, but also of popular tourist spots such as Trouville. During his career, Boudin mingled among the milieux of several seminal French artists, exhibiting alongside Jean-François Millet and Thomas Couture in his early years and befriending the young Claude Monet in the late 1850s—indeed, Boudin exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1873, one of the most important moments in the history of modern art. His submissions to the Paris Salon were successful on dozens of occasions, and his scenes of the seaside were celebrated by his contemporaries as accurate portrayals of bourgeoisie France. In addition to his seaside scenes, Boudin was a lauded still life painter, as the present example demonstrates.

The painting is signed and dated to the lower right ‘E. Boudin’ and is contained within a carved giltwood frame.

A contemporary still life by Boudin, on a canvas of the same proportions and painted in the same year—indeed, probably painted during the same period—is visible in the final photograph of this listing and is available for purchase here.