The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making – David Esterly (paperback)

he highly acclaimed memoir of a renowned artisan with a new introduction by Jenny Uglow, The Lost Carving reveals the inspirational secrets of wood and craft. On a chance visit to St James’s church, Piccadilly, David Esterly was awestruck by the delicate beauty and ambition of master carver Grinling Gibbons’s limewood decorations. The encounter changed the course of Esterly’s life as he devoted himself to these lost techniques.

By 1986, when a fire at Hampton Court Palace destroyed much of Gibbons’s masterpiece, Esterly was the only candidate to restore his idol’s work to glory, though the experience forced him to question his abilities and delve deeply into the subtle skills of making.

David Esterly (1944-2019) was widely considered one of the world’s foremost craftsmen of our era. He studied at Cambridge University and from the 1970s on devoted himself professionally to woodcarving. He restored the Gibbons carvings at Hampton Court Palace and curated the V&A Gibbons exhibition in 1998. He has been profiled in the Economist, Financial Times, New Yorker and New York Times.

Jenny Uglow is a highly acclaimed critic and biographer, and the author of numerous prize-winning non-fiction books, including The Lunar Men, Nature’s Engraver, A Gambling Man, Mr Lear and Sybil & Cyril.