The painter whose wood outsold his paintings, and the stair that seems to float

A painter started carving frames and ended up building a stair whose steps seem to float.

By Made Over Weekend · 5 min read

Wharton Esherick was born in Philadelphia in 1887. He drew on everything he could find, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for a while and left because the classes felt too rigid. In 1912 he married Letty Nofer and the young family moved to an old farmhouse near Malvern, about 25 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

For years he worked as a painter and made woodcuts for book illustrations. In 1921 the New York Tribune wrote this about his work:

Then he did something small. He began carving frames for his own paintings. The frames led to chess sets and carved figures, then to furniture for his family, then to furniture for paying clients. By the mid 1920s wood was his main work, and he later burned many of the paintings that never sold.

How it was built

In 1926 he laid stone foundations for a studio on a wooded hillside that was about to become a quarry. He used oak timbers from a barn that had been torn down and sandstone a local quarry had thrown away. He had no blueprints. His instruction to the crew was simple: "Turn when I tell you." He kept changing and adding to the building until he died in 1970.

The heart of the studio is the spiral stair he made in 1930 from red oak. It replaced the plain straight stairs. Every step is cut with a tenon that fits into a mortise in one central oak column, so the treads stick out on their own and seem to float. The stair is sturdy enough that it left the studio twice for exhibitions, including the 1939 World's Fair in New York.

What it teaches a weekend woodworker

The joint behind that stair is the mortise and tenon, one of the oldest joints there is. A tenon is a tongue cut on the end of a piece. A mortise is the hole it fits into. You can try it small with a hand saw, a chisel and a mallet: mark a tenon on the end of a short piece of pine, saw the shoulders and cheeks, then chop a matching hole in a board and pare it until the tenon slides in snug. Add glue and you have a coat peg that will hold for years. Clamp the work, keep both hands behind the chisel edge and take thin cuts.

Esherick did not start with a famous stair. He started with a picture frame. Pick one small piece this weekend, follow a plan that shows every cut, and see where the wood takes you.