Travelling presents many opportunities for “why nots,”  a break in routine has that effect. Even a normally regimented mind will urge a person to kiss a stranger and eat cake immediately upon waking up. As a Californian in Europe this past summer, my brain suggested the latter when the London sun chose mercy before midday, and I walked into Fink’s Salt & Sweet in Highbury with a ganache-driven mission. And there on the counter, displayed on tiered silver trays, I saw paintings.

The American still life artist Wayne Thiebaud devoted much of his oil paints to everyday objects: pinwheels, lipsticks, neckties, gumball dispensers, and most famously, desserts. His use of impasto and colour demonstrate a pastry chef’s familiarity with frosting–he was known to utilise additives to make his paint thicker or thinner to get a sugary coating just right.

Slices of Boston creme pie topped with glossy cherries. Ice cream sundaes scooped neatly into stemmed tulip dishes. A pair of three-tiered wedding cakes illuminated like stained glass.

For the first time in the U.K., his work is featured as a museum exhibition. With Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, The Courtauld Gallery dedicates its space to an assortment of confections, 51 works, drawn in ink and graphite, or painted in oils of purples, pinks, and blues. The exhibition revolves around an artist statement Thiebaud wrote in 1962: “Each era produces its own still life.”

I spoke with Dr. Karen Serres, the Senior Curator of Paintings at The Courtauld Gallery who expanded on this focus, “He was positioning himself in the much larger European tradition of still life. He was looking at Chardin and Cézanne but he decided to paint the objects of his time, of his era.”

The exhibition centres around the late 50s into the 60s, the era when he explored and fine-tuned his style, the one that would go on to define him. However, his artistic path continued well into the 21st century until his passing at age 101 in 2021. Notably, the last line of his obituary in The New York Times features a quote of his, “I wake up every morning and paint. I’ll be damned but I just can’t stop.”

Many of the pieces currently arranged on the walls of The Courtauld Gallery were painted in Northern California, in the state capital of Sacramento. A Northern Californian myself, I don’t just see an aerial view of the alleycropping and wetlands that supplied the industrial agricultural economy around me, as shown in Ponds and Streams (2001); I see my fifteenth birthday cake there in the background of Cakes (1963), frosted pink with a thin-lined heart in the middle.

Thiebaud’s art often depicts objects that elicit joy, specifically ones recognisable to the average American in the post-World World II era. This led many to classify him as a Pop artist, though he didn’t identify as such.

“When you’re in front of the works you realize it has nothing to do with Pop art given the thickness in paint and his earnestness in rendering these objects. He’s not being cynical about his time,” explained Dr. Serres. “He has these rows and rows of pies or cakes and you may think it’s mass production or overconsumption, but what interested him was even within a row of pies, each one of them is slightly different. For him it was a way to get people to look closely and to notice the differences.”  Not unlike savouring a chocolate cream slice, Thiebaud encourages the viewer to spend time with his art.

Thiebaud spent much of his upbringing under the expansive Southwest sky. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable during his foray into commercial art, which included comic strips, newspaper illustrations, and a brief stint as an animation apprentice at Walt Disney Studios. He decided a return to landscapes was necessary for both his career and family life. And so, with the aid of the Sacramento River’s reflections, he cultivated his eye for light, especially a fondness for halation.

In Sacramento, he took up teaching fine art and art history, eventually becoming a professor at the University of California, Davis, a role that would improve his artistic intuition. “There’s a notion of constantly being challenged and thinking about what you are doing and why you are doing it, something he applied to himself as well as his students,” Dr. Serres articulated.

He saw himself as a guide rather than an authority to his students. Between numerous gallery shows in New York and San Francisco over the years, Thiebauld kept studying, his own still lifes a dialogue with Chardin, Cézanne, and Manet.

Liberal and playful, two sensibilities associated with California and education, are expressed in the direct titles of his drawings and paintings, such as Suckers (1964), Five Hot Dogs (1961) and, Pies, Pies, Pies (1961). He stood for accessibility in sight and feeling through the memory of smell and taste.

His desserts are frequently painted in twos, threes or more. Three Cones (1964) follows Cézanne’s advice to study nature’s fundamental forms, “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” while presenting three flavours: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. The offering asks the viewer, ‘Which one would you like?’ Art to share rather than alienate.

“Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen,” Thiebaud said. An apt sentiment from someone still learning, still surprised by it all.

This aspirational way to see the world may prove difficult for those spending so many hours pressing their thumbs up and down a screen. However, with some assistance–a waft of almond and vanilla–perhaps a morning croissant has the means to adjust a perception or two.

And when the ordinary truly gets to you, on a Wednesday before work, get a slab of vanilla sponge with a cherry Swiss meringue buttercream in the name of Wayne Thiebaud.

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life is on view until 18 Jan 2026 at The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN.