Recognized as one of America’s preeminent artists of the twentieth century, Richard Diebenkorn was so closely associated with California that he was at times considered as only a west coast regional painter. His stature as a great master of American painting, however, was established in a major retrospective The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and touring to leading museums in the United States during 1998 – 99

Ingleside is the most important monumental landscape painting of Diebenkorn’s early years. This landscape, or more precisely, cityscape of suburban San Francisco, is an expression of the artist’s figurative style, before he turned to pure abstraction. Strongly influenced in those years by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian, Diebenkorn organized the undulating planes of green lawns, grey asphalt streets, and white stucco houses into a structured geometry of colored forms. So solid is the pictorial design of this painting that the artist’s confident progression into pure abstraction in the Ocean Park series is inevitable. One critic wrote of Ingleside: ​“Never did he [Diebenkorn] achieve a more dramatic tour de force of light and color, especially in the use of white, than in this eternally fresh painting.”