Three-panel folding screen

Wharton Esherick's artistic furniture and independent lifestyle made him a seminal figure in the American studio craft movement. Trained as a painter, and active in printmaking, Esherick was especially gifted in handling wood as a sculptural material. This screen relates closely to his woodblock prints of the 1920s; its chip-carved and chiseled decorations portray an abstracted landscape in low relief. The vertical edges of the panels represent tree trunks, whose bare limbs branch out across the sky in which three blackbirds fly. The lower half of the screen depicts a patchwork of farm fields with sheaves of grain, reflecting the rural environment surrounding Esherick's Pennsylvania studio.