Pies, cakes, gumball machines — perhaps it was an early stint working at a café in Long Beach, California, that prompted artist Wayne Thiebaud to begin painting diner food in the 1960s.

It proved an inspired choice: he reinvented still life as a genre and found fame in the process. Now, the Courtauld Institute explores that particularly fertile period of the artist’s life in the first-ever exhibition of his work to be held in a British museum, ‘Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life’ (until January 18, 2026).

'Three Machines', 1963, oil on canvas, 76.2cm by 92.7cm, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. (Image credit: Randy Dodson/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

Born in Mesa, Arizona, on November 15, 1920, he soon moved to Californi

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