Branding Iron

Art Historical Context

In the late 1930s, artist Fred Hassebrock captured the rugged essence of American ranching culture in his precise rendering *Branding Iron*, created around 1939 as part of Index of American Design (IAD). This watercolor, graphite, and pen-ink drawing on paper (35.5 x 26.6 cm) meticulously depicts a functional branding iron—measuring about 10 inches long overall with a 2-by-3-inch letter head—used to mark livestock ownership on the frontier. Hassebrock's work exemplifies the IAD, a New Deal-era Federal Art Project (1935–1942) that employed artists to document everyday American objects, preservi...

About the Artist

Fred Hassebrock

Fred Hassebrock is an artist for whom biographical documentation is very limited. No birth or death dates have been established, and his nationality and training are not recorded in major reference sources. His name does not appear prominently in standard art-historical surveys, and the specifics of his career — the schools he attended, the teachers who influenced him, the movements with which he...