George Washington Carver
To celebrate Black History Month, I present this charcoal portrait of agricultural scientist and educator George Washington Carver. I paint a fair number of actors, but my real heroes are usually scientists. It turns out my “knowledge” of his accomplishments was mostly based on popular legends repeated uncritically in grade school textbooks. Inventor of peanut butter? False. But the man was much more fascinating than any list of inventions, whether real or mythic.
For instance, did you know he did not have a middle name? He adopted the initial “W.” as a means of disambiguating mail delivery in a town that happened to have another George Carver. Someone else later wondered if it might stand for “Washington”, and Carver went along with it. The research institute he founded bears this name, but he never signed with it.
He is famous for developing uses for the peanut, not only for cooking, but industrial applications like making dyes, flour, and medicines. Most of these he probably didn’t invent, but were products of his meticulous research. He produced many such reports for several other crops, including my favorite, the sweet potato. The peanut one just happened to go viral, and it seems Carver very much enjoyed gaining worldwide fame.
His goal wasn’t the promotion of the peanut, though. His real intent was teaching farmers about crop rotation. The entire American South was on a crash course of exhausting the soil with annual cotton crops. Carver taught a system of rotating the cash crops with nitrogen-fixing plants, like peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, alfalfa, and so on. Documents describing broad uses for these alternative crops were his way to give farmers a financial engine that makes planting soil-restoring crops economically viable.
He did not try to patent this engine. He gave it away for free in the name of the ecology and of equality among all people. Whole industries sprouted around it, and he changed the way crops are raised forever, all over the world.
Medium: Digital
App: Proceate
Tools: Charcoal