'Apples and Poppies' Still Life by Eugène-Louis Boudin

18218: 'Apples and Poppies' Still Life by Eugène-Louis Boudin By Boudin, Eugène (French, 1824-1898) Apples and Poppies, c. 1855 Oil on canvas in a carved giltwood frame, signed lower right "E. Boudin"
Canvas: Height 92cm, width 82cm, depth 2cm
Frame: Height 116cm, width 105cm, depth 8cm

This luminous and abundantly scaled still life by Eugène Boudin captures the generous overflow of a summer garden with the directness and vitality that characterise his finest early work.
The composition centres on a weathered stone ledge from which a wicker basket of deep red apples and plums rises into the middle ground, their burnished skins observed with close tonal attention. From the ledge cascades a generous abundance of summer flowers — crimson poppies, blush roses, white phlox, yellow nasturtiums, coral hollyhocks — tumbling across the foreground in loose, overlapping layers, petals scattered across the stone below. A broad-brimmed straw hat rests to one side, its warm golden tone holding its own against the vivid intensity of the blooms. Behind, the garden dissolves into a loosely painted screen of trees and open sky, the whole scene suffused with the clear, unfiltered light of high summer and strongly suggesting a work executed entirely out of doors.
The paint handling shifts register across the canvas with characteristic confidence: the background and foliage are laid in with broad, rapid strokes, while the flowers and fruit are given more attentive treatment, each bloom rendered with a specificity of colour and weight that stops well short of botanical precision yet conveys the living presence of the subject. The saturated reds, warm ochres and clear greens of the palette carry the freshness of direct observation rather than studio reconstruction.
The work carries a distinguished exhibition history, attested by a label on the reverse of the stretcher from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, identifying it as "Apples and Poppies, c. 1855" by "Eugene-Louis Boudin" and recording its loan to the institution's exhibition "A World of Flowers" (1963) by Wildenstein and Company, Inc., New York. The painting was subsequently presented at Wildenstein's New York exhibition "The Object as Subject (Still Life Paintings from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century)" (1975, no. 9), affirming its place within the tradition of nineteenth-century French still-life painting. The work is catalogued in Robert Schmit's authoritative catalogue raisonné: R. Schmit, Eugène Boudin, vol. I, Paris, 1973, p. 178, no. 483 (illustrated).
Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) is now recognised as one of the founding figures of French Impressionism, and among the first painters to complete his canvases consistently in the open air. Born in Honfleur and encouraged early in his career by Jean-François Millet and Thomas Couture, he went on to form a close and formative friendship with the young Claude Monet, whom he introduced to plein air painting in the late 1850s — an influence Monet acknowledged throughout his life. Boudin participated in the landmark first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, received a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, and was appointed to the Légion d'Honneur in 1892. Alongside his celebrated coastal scenes, Boudin maintained a sustained practice as a still-life painter from the early 1850s, producing what he himself called his "dining room paintings" — works in which the same spontaneity of touch and fidelity to observed light that animate his landscapes are brought to bear on the domestic and natural world at close range.
Provenance: Gottlieb Rosenlecher, Château de Bourdainville Paris, Galerie de L'Elysée, Les Décorations du Château de Bourdainville, 1941 (illustrated) Wildenstein and Co., New York Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A World of Flowers, 1963 (label to reverse) New York, Wildenstein, The Object as Subject (Still Life Paintings from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century), 1975, no. 9 Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, 14 May 1980, lot 210 Mr and Mrs Ewing, Washington Thence by descent to the previous owners
Literature: R. Schmit, Eugène Boudin, vol. I, Paris, 1973, p. 178, no. 483 (illustrated)
 $270,000