Beach Scene

Inspired by the artist’s travels to Mexico, Wayne Thiebaud painted a number of luminescent beach scenes in early 1960. The present painting, Beach Shop, is the largest work from that series, and marks an important shift towards the lightened palete and broad brush strokes that would characterize his famous confection paintings from the following year. Other works from this important and formative series include Mazatlán, a small painting of boats on a beach, which resides in the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Thiebaud drew inspiration for this series of beach paintings from the work of the 19th century Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla, whose plein-air beach paintings encouraged Thiebaud to focus on the natural effects of light and shadow. These effects quickly became his trademark, as seen in the deep shadows that often border his cupcakes and pies, and such is presaged in the shadows and horizon line of the present painting, Beach Shop. As Francesca Wilmott wrote in 2018, “Aware that the work he developed in Mexico signaled an important development in the evolution of his signature style, Thiebaud exhibited these paintings widely in the early 1960s, and he continues to open his retrospectives with [such] works” [F. Wilmott, Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968, Oakland, 2018, p. 72].