Wharton Esherick and Sherwood Anderson

Wharton Esherick of Paoli, Pennsylvania, was heralded by the national art and design community as the "Dean of American Craftsmen."  What does this artist who work has been featured at three World's Fairs and exhibited by such organizations as the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts have in common with a small town newspaper publisher in the mountains of rural Virginia?

Anderson’s dream had been to be an artist, but instead he lived as a bourgeois Ohio businessman, husband, and father of three.  He increasingly spent his spare time writing.  In November of 1912 he walked away from his office and was found four days later disheveled and disoriented wandering around Cleveland. In later writings, Anderson often referred to this episode as a conscious break from his materialistic existence. After a period of recuperation, Anderson rid himself of his business, marriage, and parental responsibilities to seek a new life in Chicago.

In Chicago Anderson became acquainted with writers, journalists, and critics of the “Chicago Renaissance” of the 1910s, including Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, and the aspiring writer Ernest Hemingway.   These new intellectual friends encouraged Anderson to write about his experiences in small Ohio towns. In 1914, he divorced his wife, Cornelia, and married artist Tennessee Mitchell.  During his time in Chicago he wrote Windy McPherson's Son, Marching Men, Mid American Chants, and his best-selling novel, Winesburg, Ohio. His influence affected many of the upcoming writers, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Saroyan. He personally helped Hemingway and Faulkner publish their first books.

Wharton Esherick, a native of Philadelphia, was also a frustrated artist looking for a unique new way to express himself artistically.  He studied painting at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  After embracing the back-to-nature movement grounded in the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau's book, "Walden," in 1913 he moved his family away from the city to an old stone farmhouse near Paoli. In Paoli the Eshericks settled into a spartan existence. Wharton made the dilapidated house and barn watertight but the couple lived the life of peasants.  After war broke out, the social unrest and political chaos of the city reached as far as Paoli.  America entered the war, Philadelphia and its surrounding counties were ravaged by shortages of basic food items as well as coal.  Riots in the city and the flu epidemic made Esherick decide to accept a job as an art teacher in the remote town of Fairhope, Alabama.

Shortly after the Eshericks settled in Fairhope, Sherwood Anderson was also traveling to the Deep South to find refuge from the race riots in Chicago and the persecution of liberal thinkers during the “red scare” of 1919.  Anderson’s novel, Winesburg, Ohio, had just been published to critical acclaim, but he was, nonetheless, destitute and his marriage to Mitchell had fallen apart.  Anderson completed the first rough draft of his next novel and was seeking some quiet, cheap and inspirational getaway where he could write in peace.  The first person he met when he stepped off the Fairhope Ferry was painter Wharton Esherick. Anderson, then 44, and Esherick, 33, struck up what would become a life-long friendship.

Immersed in Fairhope's free-spirited community of artists, both men experimented with new media. Anderson threw himself into sculpting with clay and painting in a Cubist and Abstract style. Anderson gave Esherick a set of the small chisels used to create wood cuts because he understood the need of book publishers for good illustrators and most all book illustrations of that time where done either by etchings on metal plates or by wood cuts.  As avidly as he had previously sketched, Esherick was carving and printing wood block images.

By the end of 1920 both men had left Fairhope -- Esherick and his wife returning to their Pennsylvania farm house and Anderson to New Orleans and then later taking a job as a newspaper editor in Marion, Virginia, where he hung his office walls with Esherick's Fairhope paintings.