Building a Still Life the Way the Dutch Did: Inside "Forest Glass and Silver"
Most paintings you see today are built fast — block in the shapes, push some color around, done in a sitting or two. That's not how the Dutch Golden Age masters worked, and it's not how I work either. My current painting, Forest Glass and Silver, is a 24×36 still life built the old way: layer by layer, over weeks, the same sequence Willem Kalf and Pieter Claesz would have recognized 350 years ago. Here's what that actually looks like from the inside.
Start with the objects, not the brush
Before any paint touches the panel, there's a table full of decisions. This piece centers on three Fritz Heckert Waldglas roemers — hand-blown "forest glass" drinking vessels with that distinctive olive-green tint, named for the wood-ash potash used to make the glass. Alongside them: a repoussé silver pitcher, a silverplate tazza, pewter pieces, and a fragment of an antique Central Anatolian rug for the base note of pattern and color.
Arranging these isn't decoration — it's composition math. I worked through the layout via photography first, testing angles until one piece could carry the picture: a pewter charger anchoring the foreground as an ellipse, the tazza holding the center, one roemer catching the upper-right golden intersection as the visual hero, the pitcher rising as the apex. That's the architecture the whole painting hangs on.
The ground: imprimatura
Once the composition is locked, the panel gets toned — an imprimatura wash of raw umber and odorless mineral spirits, thinned to the consistency of tea. This isn't a background color choice. It's the foundation the entire indirect method depends on: a warm, transparent mid-tone that will glow through every layer painted on top of it, the same way it does in a 400-year-old Dutch panel that's darkened beautifully with age.
Drawing into the wash
With the ground down, the drawing goes in directly on top, brushed in raw umber. It's a slower, more deliberate process than sketching on bare panel — every line has to hold up against a toned surface with no white to fall back on.
The first pass: wipe-out
From there comes what's called the wipe-out method — laying in a full umber pass and then lifting paint back out of the wet layer to pull light back out of the dark, rather than adding light on top of it. This single pass does the heaviest lifting of the whole painting: it establishes the value map for every object on the panel before a single color decision gets made. Get the values right here, and the color glazes that come later have somewhere true to land.
From this point, the painting moves into grisaille, then a dead layer, then the fat-over-lean color glazes that give a finished Dutch still life its glow — but that first umber pass is where the painting either works or doesn't.
Why paint this way in 2026
It's slower. It's harder to rush, harder to fake, and it doesn't reward speed, Silver and Citrus. But it's also the only way I know to get the particular kind of light this genre is built on — light that seems to come from inside the object rather than sitting on top of it. That's what drew me to Heda, Claesz, Kalf, and Coorte in the first place, and it's the standard I'm trying to hold Forest Glass and Silver to.
I'm photographing the process as I go, and I'll be sharing more of it as the painting develops — including in the Collectors Circle, where members get progress updates and first access before a piece is publicly listed. If you want to follow this one from bare panel to finished glaze, that's the place to do it.
Durhl Davis is a self-taught classical realist painting Dutch Golden Age still life the old way — umber ground, grisaille, layered glazes — much of it composed during month-long voyages at sea as a merchant marine officer.
"Painted the old way. For those who know why that matters."
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