Quilted Chest Protection

Art Historical Context

This watercolor, graphite, and pen-and-ink rendering on paperboard, created circa 1940 by Mary Fitzgerald, is part of the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art. The Index was a New Deal project of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, in which artists documented American folk art, crafts, and decorative objects to preserve the nation’s material heritage during the Great Depression. The work depicts a quilted chest protection whose original object measured 15 inches long by 10 inches wide. Fitzgerald’s mixed-media technique captured the texture of the quilt...