Drugstore is the first painting in a small series of works from the late 1950s based on an old photograph of the artist and a young woman in front of a pharmacy window advertising Dr. West's miracle tuft brush. Absorbing the inherent reductiveness of a photograph, Rivers had begun to create works with simplified images and broad brushstrokes of paint, a reflection of Franz Kline's influence in Rivers' work of this period. Drugstore combines Rivers' aesthetic association with the Abstract Expressionist painters' impulse to record his everyday experiences in a commercially-oriented environment and in scaled-down form.

In Drugstore, and in subsequent themes taken from magazine photographs, [Rivers] found a flatter, more iconic compositional form, without surrendering the quality of human sentiment that had always attracted him...[the photographs] offered Rivers a sense of continuity with the movement of life, while putting the necessary distance between him and events (S. Hunter, op. cit., p. 47).