Edward Wates, Crafts Study Centre Trustee

The Crafts Study Centre has recently acquired a superlative manuscript book made by the late Joan Pilsbury in 1969 featuring Book Two of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’. The acquisition was a joint purchase, made with additional support from the Society of Scribes & Illuminators and the Irene Wellington Educational Trust.

The book was acquired from Joan’s son, Jonathan Piers Tyler, who was keen to ensure that it should be kept in a place accessible to the public, where it could be readily seen and admired, and where its consummate artistry would be fully appreciated. 

The book is approximately 25 x 16.5 cm, written on paper and quarter bound by Sydney Cockerell in marbled paper stretched over boards with the title painted vertically on a vellum spine. There are 23 illustrations featuring mainly wildlife subjects, brush painted in watercolour and delicately placed into around 30 pages of text. The text is written out in black ink in Joan’s distinctively relaxed yet elegant italic, which she based on Renaissance models such as Bembo’s Sonnets to be found in the V&A Museum. 

Each line opens with an upright initial, occasionally flourished, while the different sections are introduced by a painted initial ‘Versal’ letter. Small side notes in the margins on each page written in light green ink help to locate the action of the poem and serve to enliven the otherwise exceedingly restrained design. 

Ann Hechle has written: ‘The pages are exquisitely laid out and executed, with a calm serenity and generosity of spaciousness which was a particular hallmark of her work. The spacious areas of white she gives around the images enhance their quality, giving them room to breathe and to fully inhabit their position on the page . . . This book is one of the real gems of 20th century calligraphy.’

Joan Pilsbury was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 1926. She studied at the Central School with Mervyn C. Oliver and went on to teach there as assistant to Irene Wellington (examples of whose work are also held by the Crafts Study Centre). She married Neil Tyler, a BBC news editor in 1955, and the couple settled in Alphamstone, Suffolk, with their two children in 1971.

During her working life, Joan carried out many important commissions for prestigious clients such as the Royal Victorian Order, the Royal Society of Literature and the Crown Office, including Life Peerages and Royal Marriage Consents. In a lecture given to the Society of Scribes and Illuminators in 2005, she claimed to have painted forty thousand blue claws on the seven lions in the Royal Arms on over four hundred Letters Patent!

Joan Pilsbury was awarded an MBE for her services to the Crown Office in 2000 before retiring in 2006. She died in April 2016. 

www.edwardwates.com

Ann Hechle is a world-renowned calligrapher whose work is featured in the Crafts Study Centre collection. 

Photography by Colin Dunn.