Esterly was born in
Akron, Ohio but raised in
Orange County, California. He received a BA from
Harvard and a BA and Ph.D. from
Cambridge, where he read English at
St Catharine's College and was a
Fulbright Scholar. His doctoral dissertation on
Yeats and
Plotinus was supervised by
Thomas Rice Henn. 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. Esterly retreated to a cottage in
Sussex where he taught himself to carve in the high-relief illusionistic style of Gibbons. After the 1986 fire at
Hampton Court he spent a year re-carving the seven foot long Gibbons drop destroyed in the flames. The experience inspired his memoir
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (2012). In 1998 he curated the Grinling Gibbons exhibition at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, which was named as one of the exhibitions of the year by the art journal
Apollo. 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." Esterly’s own carving began as decorative foliage work but developed in the direction of still life sculpture, trophy-like tableaus, and botanical heads in the manner of
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which he began carving in 2002 while a guest artist at the
American Academy in Rome. He worked on commission for patrons in the United States, Britain, and Europe. Retrospective exhibitions took place in 2013 in New York City and at the
Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in
Utica, NY. == Personal life ==