Dress

Art Historical Context

This watercolor, graphite, and gouache study titled *Dress* was created around 1936 by Virginia Berge for the Index of American Design, a landmark New Deal project of the Works Progress Administration. During the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project hired artists to document American decorative arts, folk objects, and historic costumes that risked being forgotten. Berge’s precise rendering of a period garment belongs to this national visual archive, which recorded everyday items from colonial times through the nineteenth century with remarkable fidelity. The mixed-media technique—waterco...