Ronald Reagan portrayed in jelly beans. John F. Kennedy carved from a peach pit. Richard Nixon on a grain of rice.
The new presidential portraits at the National Portrait Gallery are a far cry from the usual stiff and stately Oval Office oils.This is art from the heart, work by self-taught Americans and foreigners who crafted ordinary stuff into expressions of exuberant affection.
One fan of Franklin Roosevelt sent him a pipe with FDR's and Eleanor's faces carved on opposite sides of the bowl. A Jimmy Carter admirer carved a Carter nutcracker.
Assembling Kennedy's face out of dyed eggshells and yarn took 72-year-old Abraham Greenhouse of Perth Amboy, N.J., more than 100 hours in 1961.
And who knows how much time Len Bulnes of New York City spent in 1971 carving and painting a very thin-looking Nixon on the head of a very thin matchstick.
"If there's a common theme to this, it's that they are all heartfelt," said curator James Barber, who discovered most of the treasures in the storerooms of presidential libraries.
Many of the 56 portraits on display in "To the President: Folk Portraits by the People" were gifts from enthusiastic new immigrants or from would-be Americans from other countries.
In 1986, Quan Thai Nguyen, a recent immigrant from Vietnam, sent the ever-fashion conscious Nancy Reagan a most original accoutrement: a portrait of Reagan painstakingly painted on an acrylic fingernail.
He said he hoped to become a manicurist and to make enough money to pay for his wife and four children to come to America, too.
Christos Diatsintos, a Greek artist living in Austria who wanted to emigrate to America, thought he might score some points by sending Harry S. Truman a little caricatured sculpture of the president fishing soon after Truman's election.
With 6,000 French stamps and work spread out over two years, Renier Georges of Lisieux, France, stuck together a stunning likeness of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which he sent as a gift in 1957.
But no one tops S. Nabi Ahmed Rizvi of Pakistan who painted Nixon the president and a young Nixon in the Navy on two tiny grains of rice. He sent the rice and a magnifying glass to the president in a plush blue velvet box.