DURHL DAVIS

Painted in the classical Flemish manner — umber ground, grisaille underpainting, dead layer, and translucent glazes built fat-over-lean — Lemons and Delft sits in the Willem Kalf tradition: blue-and-white porcelain, citrus, and ripe summer fruit gathered against a dark interior. The blue-and-white wares depicted — a paneled footed bowl and a lidded ginger jar painted with branches in plum blossom — speak the same visual language that defined Dutch Golden Age still life, when Chinese-export porcelain and the Delft potteries that imitated it became one of the most recognizable markers of trade and refinement.

Every passage was painted from life, in natural north light. Two lemons rest above the rim of the bowl; a peach in soft summer flesh leans against the jar, its skin built layer by layer until the color seems to glow from beneath the glaze.