Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents were second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and practicing Jews, an identity which influenced his artistic career. He later claimed he was "raised in a family of ironmongers and the tools were always around me." His family owned a hardware store, where he gained a deep interest in the power of ordinary objects. He was particularly fascinated by the "metaphorical" or "mythic" quality of the tools of iron-working; they would inspire his works of the early 1960s, where he attached tools to canvases creating combinations of found object and pictorial image.