Water gilding is the oldest method in the frame-maker's repertoire, and the most demanding. The surface begins with layers of gesso and bole — a clay mixture that gives gold its warm undertone — each polished smooth by hand.
Gold leaf is thinner than a wavelength of visible light. You don't place it; you persuade it.
The leaf itself arrives in books of twenty-five sheets, each so thin it can only be handled with a static-charged gilder's tip and held by the moisture in the air. The gilder breathes across the surface, lays the leaf, and burnishes it to a high polish with an agate stone — a process that cannot be rushed, retried, or faked.
It is, in the end, a craft of nerve. Every sheet is a small act of trust, and every finished frame carries the record of the hands that laid it.
