Manuscripts lit by gold
An illuminator brings manuscripts to life with gleaming embellishments inspired by nature
LIGHT FLOODS INTO Toni Watts’ peaceful conservatory studio at the back of her house in the small village of Welbourn in Lincolnshire. Spring bulbs, pale narcissi and yellow daffodils are flowering underneath the cherry trees in the garden. Birds flock and trill around the feeders outside the glass, with Blue tits, Great tits, goldfinches and starlings making regular visits. The garden backs onto countryside: a patchwork of open fields, bisected by leafy, winding lanes. Toni is concentrating on painting a robin sitting on a branch; she refers frequently to her sketches, colour notes and the photographs which she has taken on her many country walks. The painting is miniature, no more than a few centimetres in dimension, and she uses a fine brush to apply the glowing red of the robin’s breast, using small, cross-hatching movements. A pool of intensely coloured paint is contained in a cockle shell at the artist’s side.
Toni is one of the few remaining professional illuminators in the UK. She specialises in creating illuminated manuscripts, inspired by British flora and fauna. She uses wafer-thin sheets of 24-carat gold leaf; handmade gesso, which is a kind of plaster; and home-made paint, to replicate techniques which date back to the medieval period, when monks produced exquisite handwritten and illustrated books for worship and religious study. “This is half pleasure and half a job. I really love what I do,” confides Toni.
Her work combines many skills: illustration, gilding, painting and calligraphy, but also chemistry, geology and botany. Toni makes her own paints, using pigments derived from rocks, minerals, roots, berries and leaves. “I like to know how things are made and try it myself,” she explains.
Blending science and art is nothing new for her. She trained as a doctor and worked as a GP for 21 years before resigning to care for her elderly parents. “While I was a carer, I did a BA, and then an MA in art history,” she says. “Even as a child, I loved art, and I remember sitting in the playground drawing avidly. While working as a doctor, painting was a hobby, and I had regular exhibitions of my wildlife paintings.”
Shades of history
As part of her art history course, Toni visited Lincoln Cathedral to look at medieval manuscripts. “The colours were so striking that I wanted to know how they had been created,” she says. “I went home, researched it and decided to try. I used a piece of iron oxide, which I found in a local field. I bashed up the stone into small pieces with a mortar and pestle. The pigment floated off, and I poured it into a jar, where it settled, leaving clear water above. After it was separated and dried, I blended it with gum arabic and made my first watercolour paint. That was a real
‘wow’ moment for me, and it was then I decided that I must learn how to gild.”
Toni took a five-day gilding course at The Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London. “It came naturally to me. I enjoyed the intricacy of the process, and the shine of the gold,” she says. For the last eight years, Toni has been practising and learning. “It’s not easy to find teachers. There are only a handful of professional illuminators working in the UK at the moment, and it is officially an endangered craft.” She is now a sought-after tutor herself.
Sketching out
A piece of work starts with a pencil sketch on watercolour paper. Traditionally, the earliest illuminators worked on vellum, which is made from stretched and treated animal skin. Only a small proportion of Toni’s work is created with this material. “I use it if I am asked to produce something very traditional,” she explains. “There is one supplier left, in Newport Pagnell. The vellum has to be prepared to raise the nap for writing, whereas paper needs no special treatment.”
To make a circular design depicting nature in 2020, inspired by her wildlife sightings, Toni sketched out her idea, using precise geometry to draw the inner and outer circles and the spiral for the quotation she chose. The intricate lettering was done first. “That’s the bit that is most likely to go wrong, so I work on that before anything else,” she explains. The calligraphy is done with a dip pen: a wooden holder into which a nib is inserted, and Toni uses a dark ink made from locally foraged oak galls or apples, which are crushed and infused with water and iron sulphate.
Golden highlights
Manuscript gesso is applied to the areas which need to be raised; in this case, it is the names of all four seasons. Gesso is a plaster-like substance which gold leaf will stick to. It cannot be purchased, so Toni mixes her own, using white lead, slaked plaster, seccotine glue, derived from fish, sugar and a pinch of Armenian bole, which is an earthy red clay. The ingredients are ground together on a large granite slab until the mixture is smooth and thick, with the consistency of cream. This takes approximately one hour. “I use a 15th century recipe because there is simply nothing better,” says Toni.
The gesso is painted onto the paper, using a synthetic sable mix brush, to create a raised dome. “Medieval illuminators would have used a quill,” explains Toni. “Laying the gesso is difficult. There are many pitfalls, such as getting air bubbles on the surface, which will cause dimples and holes when it hardens.” After the gesso dries, which can take from 10 minutes to 24 hours, depending on atmospheric conditions, the
“an aura, a glow, the gold dust upon a butterfly’s wing, the bloom upon a peach”
Flora Thompson, The Peverel Papers
surface is burnished to create a satiny surface. Thin gold leaf is then taken and placed on a rectangular suede gilder’s cushion, using squirrel hair brushes, called a gilder’s tip, to lift them. The leaves cannot be touched with the fingers, as they will stick to the warmth of the skin. The gold is bought from a supplier in Cheshire, with 25 sheets costing approximately £30. Toni used four different colours to decorate the different seasons in her circle design: white; a green gold; pure 24-carat gold; and a red gold for autumn.
She cuts the amount of leaf that she needs for her first letter, making a ‘windbreak’ with a sheet of paper to stop the delicate fragments from flying away. To attach gold leaf to a letter, she breathes on the gesso two or three times. “This makes the sugar in the gesso sticky, so the gold will adhere,” she explains.
Excess leaf is brushed away using a bushy brush, called a gilder’s mop. Between three and five layers of gold are usually applied on raised areas. The gold is then burnished with a tool known as a dog’s tooth burnisher, so-named because of its shape. “Medieval artists would have used a real canine tooth from a dog or a wolf,” explains Toni. “But mine is made from agate.” She uses tiny circular motions to polish the gold until it gleams. “Getting the shine is very satisfying. It’s my favourite part of the process,” she says.
Garlic and honey
For areas of the design which require flat gold leaf, rather than a raised pattern, she applies a garlic juice bond, known as a mordant. It is made by squeezing garlic cloves through a muslin cloth. The juice is collected and painted onto the paper and allowed to dry. “I breathe on it and it becomes sticky. The gold leaf is laid on top,” says Toni.
Shell gold paint, which can be seen on the lettering of the months, is made by mixing runny honey, from the hives of a friend who lives locally, on a plate with leaf gold. She uses her finger to do this, and it breaks the gold into minute particles. The honey is gently washed off, and the gold is mixed with gum arabic to make the paint.
Traditional paints
Once the gilded parts of the work are completed, the first layer of coloured paint is applied. Where possible, medieval recipes for pigments are used. “These can be ground-up minerals, such as lapis lazuli for the blue sky, malachite for the green grass and sedimentary rock for the brown of the wood mouse and the otter,” says Toni. Pink, such as that of the dog rose, and the yellow of the Brimstone butterfly are made using plants, either grown in her garden or foraged from hedgerows in late summer. “I use buckthorn berries to make warm yellow, weld for lemon yellow and madder root for pink,” she explains. The paint pigments are mixed with gum to create watercolour paint. Dried pigments are stored in lidded jars for future use.
Toni’s circular design took three weeks to create, not counting the time taken to mix the gesso and make the paint. “You need patience, tenacity and a steady hand to do this,” she says. “I do become absorbed, and sometimes I have to work
“pen and pencil yield an equal grace; To guide whose hand the sister Arts combine, And trace the Poet’s or the Painter’s line; Whose magic touch can bid the canvas glow” Lord Byron, ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’
at a little table in the living room in the evenings so that I can still see my husband, Tony.”
As well as taking commissions, including pieces to celebrate weddings, Christenings and significant birthdays for private buyers and collectors, Toni is currently the official illuminator at Lincoln Cathedral, which is 13 miles away. “From 2015 to 2016, I was the artist in residence, then I was asked to stay on,” she says. During her first tenure, she recreated some manuscript pages from the library, so that people could see what was held there, and she made a range of work about the artisans who have worked at the cathedral over the centuries, including glaziers, masons, joiners and needleworkers. Now, her role includes conducting demonstrations and running workshops to teach gilding. “The welcome from the cathedral ‘family’ has been truly wonderful,” she says. “I have had the privilege of turning the pages of medieval manuscripts and have learned about Lincoln Cathedral and its history.”
Toni spends most of her days in her studio, except when she is out exploring Lincolnshire or visiting Cumbria or Scotland, where she observes the native birds and wildlife which appear in her work. “I see a Barn owl hunting over the fields near me at dawn, but Tony and I travel to Cumbria to see Red squirrels,” she says. “Last year, for the first time, we saw otters playing on the beach in the Ardnamurchan Peninsula in Scotland. It was so exciting to see them in real life and go on to recreate them in a piece of work. I am so interested in wildlife and the garden.
“To observe these things, to grow plants, gather minerals and then to combine everything into a painting is why I genuinely love what I do.”