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| Anonymous German sculptor Portrait of an unknown man ca. 1680-1700 miniature ivory bust Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Justus Glesker St Mary Magdalene ca. 1650 ivory statuette Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Justus Glesker St Mary Magdalene ca. 1650 ivory statuette (back) Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Gaspar van der Hagen William Augustus Hanover, Duke of Cumberland ca. 1767 miniature ivory portrait bust on wooden socle Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Anonymous Swedish sculptor Queen Christina of Sweden ca. 1830-50 miniature ivory portrait bust on ivory base Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Anonymous German sculptor Bust of a youth, after Michelangelo's Daniel ca. 1850 miniature ivory bust on ivory socle Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Master of the Furies (Austria) Figure of Adam, after Michelangelo's David ca. 1610 ivory statuette Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Benjamin Cheverton William Huntington ca. 1850 miniature ivory portrait bust on marble base Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Johann Leonhard Bauer Orpheus and Eurydice 1715 ivory statuette Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Mary Grant Lady Augusta Elizabeth Frederica Stanley 1877 miniature ivory portrait bust on wooden socle Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Arthur George Walker Emmeline Pankhurst ca. 1929 miniature ivory portrait bust on stone socle Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian sculptor St Sebastian ca. 1470-85 ivory relief-panel Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Franck (photographer: Paris) Ivory Statuette of Hercules by Jean de Bologne 1868 photographic print Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Franck (photographer: Paris) Ivory Bust by Lacroix 1868 photographic print Victoria & Albert Museum |
"A cane shop separates the café called the Petit Grillon from the rooming-house entrance. Its owner is an honorable tradesman who offers his shady clientele luxury items in great profusion and variety, grouped so that the bodies and heads alike show to their best advantage. A complete art of panoply is elaborated within this space: the bottom canes fan out while the upper ones, placed criss-cross, favor a singular tropism which makes them bend their pommel-blooms toward the spectator: ivory roses, dog heads with gem eyes, a damascened twilight from Toledo – they are inlaid with sentimental wisps of foliage, cats, women, hooked beaks, and come in myriad materials ranging from twisted rattan to rhinoceros horn by way of the blond charm of cornelians. Several days after the conversation mock-reported above, I spent an entire evening in the Petit Grillon waiting for someone who thought better of joining me; conscious of cutting a peculiarly lonely figure, I would order a fresh drink every quarter hour to justify my presence, losing with each drink a fraction of my inventive powers; at length, having borne beyond endurance the cross of my vigil, I stepped exhausted into the darkened passage. Fancy my surprise when, attracted to the cane shop by a kind of mechanical drone which seemed to emanate from its display window, I saw the window suffused as if under water with a glaucous light, whose source remained hidden from view. It brought to mind the phosphorescence of fish, which I had had the chance to observe when a child on the jetty of Port-Bail, in the Cotentin, but I was compelled to recognize that although canes may conceivably possess the luminous properties of sea creatures, no physical law seemed adequate to explain this preternatural light and especially the hollow noise filling the vault of the arcade. That noise I knew: it was the voice of seashells, which never fails to astound poets and film stars. The entire ocean here in the Passage de l'Opéra. The canes were gently swaying to and fro, like kelp. I hadn't yet recovered from this spell when I noticed a form swimming between the various strata on display. She was slightly smaller than the average woman but in no way impressed one as dwarf-like. Rather, her diminutiveness seemed the optical effect of distance, yet this apparition was directly inside the window. Her hair had come undone, her fingers occasionally grasped the canes. I would have taken her for a siren, in the most literal sense of the word, for it seemed to me that the lower portion of this charming specter, who was naked to the girdle which she wore at hip level, tapered into a dress of steel or scales or perhaps rose petals; but on drawing nearer to see her drifting through the waves of the atmosphere, I suddenly recognized this person despite her emaciated features and the far-away look imbuing them. It was as a member of the occupation forces humiliating the Rhineland, in the confused aftermath of war and buoyed by a wave of prostitution, that I met, on the banks of the Saar, the Lisel who had refused to follow her people in retreat during the disaster, and all night long on the Sofienstrasse would sing songs she had learned from her father, a master of the hunt by profession. What could she be doing here, among the canes? And she was still singing, to judge from the movement of her lips, for the pounding of the surf behind the window rose above her voice, up to the mirrored ceiling which obscured the moon and the menacing shadow of the cliffs beyond. "The ideal!" was all I could exclaim in my confusion. The siren turned a frightened face toward me and then held out her arms, whereupon the entire display convulsed. The canes which stood criss-crossed swiveled forward ninety degrees so that the upper portion of the X pressed its V against the window glass, completing the curtain drawn over the apparition. It was as if a battle scene had suddenly been fenced from view by a rank of lances. The light died along with the noise of the sea."
– Louis Aragon, from Le Paysan de Paris (1924), translated as Nightwalker by Frederick Brown (1970)