You may have noticed by now that the Wharton Esherick Museum is celebrating a very different anniversary than other cultural institutions across the country; WEM has been preoccupied with the Studio’s Centennial year in the midst of the nation’s 250th. As our region prepares for semisesquicentennial celebrations over the summertime, we’re pleased to highlight a piece in the Wharton Esherick Museum collection that tells a longer, more expansive story of American decorative arts in our region: Wharton’s antique Carved Chest. The piece was recently moved back into the artist’s bedroom where it lived during the tail-end of his lifetime, so be sure to check it out on your next tour of the Studio!
Wharton Esherick purchased this chest in the early 1920s in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, roughly fifteen miles northwest of his home in Paoli. At the time Esherick bought the chest—prior to remaking it in his own image with a set of carving tools and his signature—this piece would have been understood quite differently. At WEM, our focus is naturally on materials that Esherick crafted, and it’s rare to have insight into them before the artist’s first encounter. By 1922 however, this chest had likely existed for well over one hundred years and had accumulated its share of history. What was it that Esherick actually purchased?
We’re led to believe this is a Pennsylvania German-made chest dating to the last quarter of the 18th century based on a close examination of the original hardware, construction techniques, and materials. Chests like this made in walnut were often left unpainted due to the wood’s figural grain that could approximate the look of mahogany, where pine chests were often painted in polychrome decoration and fraktur. Many surviving examples were produced right here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Given this chest was made in our immediate region close to 250 years ago and that Esherick bought it in Montgomery County, it’s quite possible this chest never left our area.
While the chest itself likely has origins dating back to the century of our country’s founding, the dealer who sold it to Wharton, Catherine Cookerow, was a pivotal figure in the colonial revival movement that began to repopularize the nation’s early decorative arts around the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia. It’s unclear whether Esherick knew of Catherine Cookerow’s status in the colonial revival movement given he wasn’t subscribing to The Magazine Antiques where she frequently advertised. However, Cookerow had been dealing in American antiques since at least 1899, and had built herself a respectable business patronized by leading tastemakers and collectors of the day such as Henry Ford, the Wilmington Duponts, and Edward Atlee Barber.
Esherick recollected the purchase in an interview done by his daughter Ruth and son-in-law Bob almost fifty years later. Esherick remembered that this chest was in a barn on Mrs. Cookerow’s property, and that it was so high up on shelves stuffed to the brim with antiques that he had to crane his neck to even see it! Esherick offered Mrs. Cookerow $50 for the piece. Once it was taken down off the shelves, the two discovered that the legs were broken and in need of repair, but agreed that it was a “good chest” regardless. Esherick subsequently made a new set of legs for the chest with subtle relief carving quite uncharacteristic for Pennsylvania German furniture. It’s possible putting these legs together may have been one of Esherick’s first attempts at joinery given some of the dovetails are inverted.
Along with the necessary structural repair, in 1922, Esherick took his carving tools to the front and sides of the chest, maintaining the unadorned board on the back. The artist transformed the chest’s plain show surfaces into relief-carved scenes of the family’s farmstead Sunekrest. The front of the chest shows the farmhouse and adjacent barn, with the flora and fauna that surrounded them in dynamic swirling lines. Esherick then signed his name and the date on the lip, marking a new phase of life for this old chest.
While we don’t know exactly what life had in store for this chest between the time it was first made in the 18th century and when Esherick found it in Catherine Cookerow’s barn in the early 1920s, we do know that it has spent the remainder of its life in the southeastern part of Penn’s Woods. Here, we see one of the ways Esherick engaged with early American and regional craft before breaking ground on his bank barn-inspired Studio in 1926. The artist honored the long history of this chest by extending its life through repairs, and marked his own place in the development of American decorative arts by adorning the chest with carvings of the artistic lifestyle he was pioneering on the hillside two centuries later.
Post written by Public Programs and Collections Manager, Ethan Snyder
May 2026