Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona and was raised in southern California. In the summer of 1936, sixteen-year-old Thiebaud worked at the Walt Disney Studios in the animation department before serving in the United States Army Air Force during World War II. After his service, he continued to work as a commercial artist—designing movie posters, making cartoons, and working in advertising—before pursuing the study of fine art in the late 1940s. Studying under the G.I. Bill, Thiebaud earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the California State University in Sacramento. While still in graduate school he began his teaching career, working as an art professor for eight years at Sacramento Junior College before joining the faculty of the University of California Davis. Thiebaud enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a teacher, and after retiring at age seventy, he continued to give popular classes as professor emeritus. Apart from a sabbatical year spent in New York in the late 1950s, Thiebaud worked in California for his entire career.

By the early 1960s, Thiebaud was painting the subjects for which he is best known today, depicting quintessentially American, everyday objects in bright colors—such as cakes and pies, hot dogs and hamburgers, gumballs and lollipops, and jackpot machines. Rather than painting from life, Thiebaud represented these objects from memory, drawing from nostalgic recollections of bakeries and diners from his youth and contemporary commercial imagery. Working with thickly applied paint, Thiebaud often spotlit his objects against pale backgrounds with the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements. To heighten their chromatic intensity, he outlined his forms in radiant colors to achieve a halo-like effect. In addition to his still lifes, Thiebaud also painted portraits in the same style, depicting sober-faced figures set against empty backgrounds.

Hors d’Oeuvres, painted in 1963, is an intimate example of Thiebaud’s early depictions of quintessentially American foods. Thick strokes of cream-colored paint surround the crackers that are organized in three orderly rows, alternating with different toppings. Rendered in a classically Thiebaud style, with an unusual, close-up perspective and vivid cobalt shadows, Hors d’Oeuvres expresses the cultural consciousness of the Sixties in America, while evoking nostalgia and calling attention to the artist’s painterly hand.

In 1962, Thiebaud achieved critical and commercial success with his breakthrough show at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. Although he is often classified as an American Pop painter—and he was included in the two historic and groundbreaking shows of 1962 that established the movement—Thiebaud never felt that he belonged in the movement, and preferred to describe himself as “just an old-fashioned painter.” He has created still lifes, landscapes, and portraits that are familiar and quotidian, but also deeply indebted to the history of art, from the masters of European and American painting to the traditions of Chinese landscapes and Japanese woodcuts.

After purchasing an apartment in San Francisco in the early 1970s, Thiebaud embarked on a series of landscapes and cityscapes, painting the steep hills and vertiginous inclines of the city in colorful, dramatic canvases. With his characteristic vibrant palette and meticulous technique, he represented dizzying, upended views of San Francisco’s streets and buildings. In the mid-1990s he began a series of landscapes of the Sacramento River Delta, painting its watery environs and surrounding fields in pools of unexpected, vibrant hues. Rejecting traditional perspective, he largely disregarded the sky or horizon line in favor of flat, aerial views. Beginning in the early 2000s, Thiebaud also focused on a series of mountains, a subject he first began painting in the 1960s—depicting dramatic close-up and cross-section views of fantastic, towering summits with luminous colors and rich textures. These works merge fiction and reality, drawing from the artist’s memories of mountains he had seen in childhood. Conveying a sense of the sublime, they are also influenced by the history of landscape painting of the American West.