My original tumblr post was here. This image was researched by Bacchus at ErosBlog as part of the “Δ commission.” The research was originally published at Hedonix as “Δ 063 – Accumulate Orgones With Dr. Reich.” Here is what Bacchus found.

Thanks to a fortuitous eBay listing, we learn that this artwork by Walter Richards illustrated an article on page 50 of the April 1962 issue of the men’s adventure magazine True. The article, by Carlton Brown and Donald G. Cooley, was called The Man Who Boxed Sex:

It begins “For all the problems in the world — personal, political, scientific, or medical — Dr. Wilhelm Reich had an extraordinary popular solution: orgone energy. It kept him and his faithful followers in headlines for years.”

Information in the Wikipedia entry on orgone energy suggests that the illustration from True probably depicts an orgone energy accumulator, a device built by Dr. Reich with the ostensible purpose of collecting orgone energy from the environment for the improvement of health. For a hilariously strident defense of Dr. Reich’s work — or at least an attack on his critics in general but particularly as those critics have found expression at Wikipedia — see this page from the “Orgone Biophysical Research Lab”.

The artist credit “Walter Richards” probably refers to Walter DuBois Richards, as profiled for a gallery showing by the New York Times in 1999 and remembered at this blogspot blog by one of his grandchildren.