Roast Beef Dinner (Trucker's Supper)
Artist: Wayne Thiebaud (American, 1920-2021)
Date: 1963
Dimensions:
Painting: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 2009.65
Label Text:Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.
—Wayne Thiebaud
The quintessential truck stop meal of an open-faced roast beef sandwich and French fries (plus bread and butter on the side!) is here laid out as a still life of simplified formal elements—circular plates, cylindrical glass, rectangular sandwich, square slices of bread—to present a complex and seductive painted surface. The viewpoint is such that we could almost pull up a chair and sit down to this hearty fare.
Wayne Thiebaud's paintings of food and consumer goods (cakes and pies, gumball machines and lipsticks) first emerged in mature form in 1961–62 and have become a familiar part of our visual landscape. His inclination towards depictions of commonplace objects from middle-class America—decidedly "blue collar" subjects—manifested itself in the mid-1950s, before the romance with similar consumer subjects that characterized the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Unlike most other Pop artists, he treated the everyday trappings of ordinary America, particularly diner culture, with affection rather than cynicism.
—Wayne Thiebaud
The quintessential truck stop meal of an open-faced roast beef sandwich and French fries (plus bread and butter on the side!) is here laid out as a still life of simplified formal elements—circular plates, cylindrical glass, rectangular sandwich, square slices of bread—to present a complex and seductive painted surface. The viewpoint is such that we could almost pull up a chair and sit down to this hearty fare.
Wayne Thiebaud's paintings of food and consumer goods (cakes and pies, gumball machines and lipsticks) first emerged in mature form in 1961–62 and have become a familiar part of our visual landscape. His inclination towards depictions of commonplace objects from middle-class America—decidedly "blue collar" subjects—manifested itself in the mid-1950s, before the romance with similar consumer subjects that characterized the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Unlike most other Pop artists, he treated the everyday trappings of ordinary America, particularly diner culture, with affection rather than cynicism.
Not on view
In Collection(s)