Edgar Tolson

1904-1984

Edgar Tolson was a Baptist preacher who abandoned his ministry because he felt that he was unable to live up to the high standards he set for himself.  His explicitly detailed, carved tableaux, illustrate his unerring belief that the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve set the course of history. A native of Kentucky, Tolson was the fourth of eleven children of a tenant farm family, and he began carving wood as a hobby. Using a penknife, he would whittle animals, walking sticks and simple figures in the Appalachian tradition. After leaving school he became a preacher and earned his living as a carpenter and stonemason, until a disabling stroke forced him to give up work in his early fifties. He became a full-time woodcarver and began to produce more ambitious pieces on religious and political themes as well as continuing to carve stylized figures of people and animals, assembled and partially colored with ink, paint or pencil. Tolson carved over a hundred versions of the Temptation, the best-known of which is his “Fall of Man” cycle, a series of eight tableaux telling the story of Adam and Eve and the consequences of their actions.  Tolson’s work first gained national recognition through a government scheme to assist Appalachian craftspeople.