NEW YORK, NY.- Last week, Noah Verrier bought a box of crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from a Publix grocery store.

He unwrapped one and studied its pale, spongy exterior. He took a bite. The sunlight in his studio illuminated a droplet of strawberry goo.

Where others might have seen a Smucker’s Uncrustables sandwich, Verrier saw a muse. He spent two days capturing its likeness in a moody oil painting — and then sold that original painting for just under $5,000 in an online auction that ended Sunday.

Verrier, 44, an artist who lives in Tallahassee, Florida, has carved out a lucrative niche on social media with his still life paintings of junk food. He has rendered greasy cheesesteaks, extra-large sodas and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets in delicate brushstrokes.

“I always try to eat something before I paint it, just to have that connection with it,” he said in an interview Monday.

Verrier paints his subjects alla prima, a technique favored by the impressionists that involves layering wet paint. Then, unlike the impressionists, he blasts them out on his social media accounts: His Uncrustables painting has been viewed more than 12 million times on X.

Some commenters groaned at what they saw as a gimmick, but far more demanded the painting be displayed in the Louvre. Ryan Morgan, 35, a political consultant in Arlington, Virginia, saw the sandwich on Instagram and placed a bid for $4,050 on Sunday.

“I think this is the rare painting that both me and my 2-year-old can appreciate,” Morgan said. (His wife “wasn’t the biggest fan.”)

He bowed out as the bidding neared the $5,000 threshold. The buyer of the painting, who did not respond to a request for comment, remains a mystery.

Verrier’s work has caught the attention of fast food chains including Popeyes and Wendy’s, which flooded him with requests for paintings of their menu items after a grilled cheese painting of his drew a great deal of attention online in 2022. Such commissions now cost “in the tens of thousands” of dollars, he said.

The Uncrustables painting was not sponsored: Verrier has painted the sandwiches several times because his four children eat a lot of them.

Verrier took up oil painting while earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Florida State University, where professors introduced him to French painters Édouard Manet and Jean Siméon Chardin. Their still life works featured flowers, cheese and baskets of lemons.

In his senior year, Verrier tried to apply their style to Goldfish crackers and a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. “It’s something that’s more interesting than a lemon,” he said. “Like, a lemon has got its own beauty, but it’s not as connected to who we are today.”

He now gravitates toward processed foods with uncanny textures, waxy packaging and Day-Glo food coloring. A Mountain Dew Baja Blast is a good subject because the drink is so unnaturally turquoise, he said. His ideal jelly is riddled with additives.

“Sometimes, whoever’s ordering the groceries orders the nonartificial one, and I’m like, ‘I can’t use this,’” he said. “You’ve got to have the colors, the translucency.”

Verrier got his Master of Fine Arts degree from FSU in 2013 and taught painting and drawing there until 2017, when he left to paint full time.

He acknowledges that he is not alone in his genre. Cindy Procious has painted realist Moon Pies and pints of beer, and Pamela Michelle Johnson painted gummy bears and a stack of PB&Js over a decade ago. Long before that, processed foods were a preoccupation of Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol, among others.

Still, Verrier seems to have a particular flair for the zeitgeist that has helped his work reach digital audiences. He painted the purple McDonald’s Grimace Shake that splashed across TikTok last year, and the turquoise Stanley tumbler beloved by tweens. His painting of a meal from Taco Bell made a brief cameo in the background of the 2024 movie “Mean Girls.”

“People are like, ‘Oh, it’s corporate,’” he said, echoing an intermittent criticism his work receives online. He said he took care to mark which of his paintings were paid for by brands like Hardees or Dunkin’.

Even so, he does not mind giving fast food brands the occasional viral morsel. “It’s part of our childhood, it’s part of our memories, it’s part of nostalgia,” he said. “Like, why would you not want to paint that?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.