Presidential Ham: Every US President, Painted Holding a Ham

Presidential Ham is a gallery of oil paintings depicting every president of the United States. In each one, the president is holding a ham. There is no artist’s statement explaining this, no essay about American meat consumption and executive power, no wink at the audience. Washington, ham. Lincoln, ham. Nixon, ham. The site simply lays them out in chronological order and lets you scroll.

What is Presidential Ham?

The premise is one sentence long, which is exactly the right length for it. Every president, painted, with a ham. What makes it worth more than a passing chuckle is the execution.

These are not digital edits. Somebody painted them, in oils, one at a time, and painted them in the visual language of each president’s own century. The early ones have the stiff, formal look of a colonial portraitist working from a live sitting. The nineteenth century entries carry the darker palette and heavy varnish of the period. The modern ones drift toward the looser, brighter style of a contemporary official portrait. The ham is rendered with the same care as the face.

That commitment is the whole joke. An absurd idea executed badly is a meme; an absurd idea executed with genuine craft over a long period becomes something stranger and better. Scrolling the gallery, you start reading the paintings as actual portraits, noticing how each president is posed, how the ham is being held, whether it is being displayed proudly or clutched defensively or just sort of present. Some of them look like they are about to make a speech about the ham. A few look like they would rather not discuss it.

The site itself is as plain as the concept. A grid of portraits, names, dates, and the ability to click through to a larger view. No autoplay video, no scroll-jacking, no manifesto. It is a museum wing with a single, unwavering curatorial idea.

Projects like this are why the independent web is worth defending. Nothing about Presidential Ham is optimized for anything. It does not want your email address. It will not be A/B tested into a funnel. Someone had a stupid idea, decided the correct response was to spend a great deal of time painting it properly, and then put it online for free.

What can you do on Presidential Ham?

• Scroll the full gallery. Every president in order, each with a ham. The chronological sweep is the intended experience.
• Compare the painting styles. Watch the technique shift across two and a half centuries of American portraiture, ham held constant throughout.
• Click into individual portraits. Larger views reveal how much detail went into faces, hands, backgrounds and, yes, the ham.
• Read the captions. Each entry carries brief notes, delivered with the same deadpan seriousness as the paintings.
• Find your favorite ham posture. They differ. Some presidents cradle it, some present it, some appear to be defending it. This becomes surprisingly important.
• Look for prints. The project has offered prints and merchandise at various points, if you want a president holding a ham on your wall permanently.

Tips to get the most out of it

Go in chronological order the first time. The gallery is funniest as a sequence, because the running gag accumulates. Jumping straight to your favorite president loses the drumbeat of ham after ham after ham.

Zoom in on the hands. Painting a convincing grip on an object is one of the harder things in portraiture, and a lot of the technical work in this project is concentrated in how each president is actually holding the thing.

Compare an entry against the real official portrait. Pull up the genuine White House portrait of the same president in another tab. The compositions often rhyme, which makes the intrusion of the ham significantly funnier.

Do not look for the meaning. There isn’t one. Every visitor spends about thirty seconds trying to decode a satirical thesis and every visitor eventually gives up, which is the correct outcome.

Show it to someone with no context. The optimal way to share this site is to send the link with no message attached. Any explanation you provide will be worse than the site.

Notice the lesser-known presidents. Everyone checks Lincoln and Washington first. The real rewards are in the forgotten nineteenth century one-termers, who look genuinely pleased to finally be holding something.

If you like Presidential Ham, also try…

• The Million Dollar Homepage: another one-idea project executed to completion and frozen online forever.
• Ling’s Cars: total commitment to an indefensible aesthetic, sustained for decades.
• Artvee: if the portraiture side interests you, thousands of genuine public domain paintings to download.
• Cockeyed: a man conducting elaborate, pointless experiments with the same straight face.

Find more inexplicable dedication in Weird & Wonderful, or go looking for actual art in Design & Creativity.