Wharton Esherick (1887–1970) was an artist, vegetarian and nudist, who changed tracks early in

Wharton Esherick with "Essie," 1933, cocobola.

his career. From the high precincts of fine art he traveled an unexplored path into a thicket of furniture, turning tables, chairs and even simple salad bowls into sculptural objects. While his earliest designs were massive and intricately carved with low reliefs, he moved on to experiment with cubism, expressionism and biomorphism, finally achieving an organic style based on the natural growth patterns of trees.

In 1912, Esherick—then an aspiring Impressionist—and his wife, both upper-middle-class Philadelphians, decided to live an “organic,” Bohemian life in Paoli, Pennsylvania, a rural community only 25 miles from downtown and a railroad stop on the Main Line. They did indeed live simply, in fact nearly on a subsistence level, but also made important alliances with artists and wealthy patrons at the nearby Rose Valley Arts and Crafts community and the community’s theater.

During the 1920s, Esherick began printing woodblock book illustrations and creating attention-grabbing picture frames, sculpture and furniture. Unable to break into the painting market, he reluctantly folded up his easel in 1925 and from then on considered himself a sculptor, whether he was working on functional or non-functional forms.

Esherick’s early forays into furniture design grew out of his aversion to the hand-me-down Victoriana he and his wife had grown up with, some of which he rebuilt or redecorated by carving low reliefs on the surfaces. When it came to building from scratch, he approached each piece as a sculptor, making a clay model to communicate the form to a local cabinetmaker, John Schmidt, then collaborating with Schmidt to determine how to turn the shape into a piece of functional furniture. Robert Aibel of the Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia suggests that in so doing Esherick more or less turned the Modernist dictum “form follows function” on its head.