What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

Wayne Thiebaud may be best known for his depictions of scrumptious confections, but he also painted significant landscapes and cityscapes. Thiebaud painted the landscape in his home state of California throughout his life. with vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes, often abstracting the scene into lines and blocks of color, infusing the painting with his characteristic energy.

He found mountains particularly compelling and challenging: “Mountains are a subject matter of unending challenges.... It’s such a rich subject matter that’s been treated very, very well by so many other wonderful painters–and that’s another, I think, helpful thing to me because I look constantly at the Hudson River School and the primitive paintings, folk paintings, wonderful Japanese and Chinese paintings of mountains–an extraordinary legacy of the beauty of mountains.”

Early in the 1950s, Thiebaud was commissioned to paint the landscape and river outside of Sacramento, where Folsom Dam was to be built, later completed in 1956. The present tempera painting shows the river canyon, preserving a view of the untouched landscape, its beauty on the cusp of permanent change. The parched foreground, with its lively brushstrokes and dots of color, reaches back in diagonal lines that echo the hills beyond. Thiebaud draws the viewer into the picture and up into the hills to contemplate man’s impact on the land.