David Esterly

He had rejected the idea of an academic career even before a conversion experience in 1974, when the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving behind the altar at St. James, Piccadilly turned him towards woodcarving.

After the 1986 fire at Hampton Court he spent a year re-carving the seven foot long Gibbons drop destroyed in the flames.

[4] His accompanying book, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving (fifth printing, March 2013), was described as “a marvelous study” that has “a rare intimacy with its subject.

Retrospective exhibitions took place in 2013 in New York City and at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica, NY.

Esterly was married to Marietta von Bernuth and lived in the rural hamlet of Barneveld in upstate New York.