Washington on Ivory: Interspecies Intimacies and the Violence of Eighteenth-Century Portraiture

George Washington was painted on ivory more than any other person. His clean-shaven face, powdered hair, and clenched jaws grace numerous ivory miniatures—a genre of small-scale portraiture widely popular among eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans. People treasured these haptic artworks as tangible traces of the national icon; they sought a sense of embodied proximity to Washington, sometimes enhanced by locks of his hair enclosed alongside his likeness. Yet in privileging interpersonal intimacy, viewers overlooked the interspecies intimacies cultivated by and documented within ivory miniatures. This paper uncovers how miniatures produced embodied encounters among not only subjects and viewers, but also elephants killed for their tusks and other animals from whose bodies people extracted artistic materials. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that these were precarious and often violent intimacies, subject to nonhuman as well as human agencies. I take Washington as my focus because of the prevalence of his portraits as well as his remarkably formative and well-documented encounters with ivory. Miniatures of Washington depict a man who clenched ivory dentures between his jaws and dined with ivory tableware maintained by people enslaved in his home. They depict a body groomed by an enslaved valet who shaved Washington’s face with an ivory razor and coiffed his hair with an ivory comb. Examining these ivory objects alongside both pristine and damaged miniatures, I consider how Washington, his painters, and his admirers attempted to bend fragments of elephant tusk to their will, but also how the animal material often refused to comply.