Mitt

Art Historical Context

This watercolor and graphite rendering, titled *Mitt* and created around 1938 by Marie Alain, belongs to the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art. The Index was a Depression-era Federal Art Project that hired artists to create precise visual records of American decorative arts, folk crafts, and everyday objects from colonial times through the nineteenth century. Alain’s work on paperboard uses watercolor to capture color and surface while graphite supplies clean outlines and fine details—a technique typical of Index plates, which aimed for scientific accuracy rather than pe...