After a lifetime working as ranch hand and carpenter throughout California, retired Scotsman George L. Hutcheson turned his skill with wood toward a remarkable artistic undertaking: carving a complete set of busts of the Presidents of the United States. Twice.
 

Nixon was the 37th President of the United States at the time, making the collection a record of the American presidency from Washington to the end of the Nixon era. And as such, the surviving collection consists of 37 hand carved presidential busts.
 

George was self-taught, an 'outsider artist', learning from the stacks of library books he’d sign out from the Glendale library near his home. The busts are therefore especially interesting as the work of an accomplished craftsman who, while coming to portrait sculpture near the end of his life, brought decades of experience working with wood.
 

As mentioned, there are two sets of George's presidential portraits. One set was sold during his lifetime. The second remained with his longtime friend Dora Verdugo, who subsequently bequeathed them and a number of his paintings to our mother, George's closest neice. The collection has consequently remained together through several generations and is offered today with its family provenance and history intact.

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For collectors, historians and anyone interested in American folk art, Californian history or the traditions of outsider art and craftsmanship, this is a particularly unusual surviving body of work: 37 individually carved portraits representing the Presidents from Washington to Nixon, created by one California craftsman in the later years of his life. Twice.