Landscape was one of the first topics that Lichtenstein turned to following his comic-inspired Pop breakthrough, and one to which he returned with some regularity. He was drawn to clichéd or dated subjects, and the genre of landscape seemed appealingly remote from avant-garde concerns. While their subject matter seems unlike Lichtenstein's early Pop comic paintings, his painted landscapes were in fact appropriated from the backgrounds of cartoon scenes. Lichtenstein used the same durable halftone dots but here distilled the compositions down to the most basic pictorial elements. The results progress from more overtly representational works like Sunrise (1965) to almost completely abstract works like the blue Seascape (1964). The black outlines present in Sunrise disappear, leaving bands of solid color and massed groupings of dots to define the pictorial space—ocean, mountains, sky.
Roy Fox Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody.