Robert W.R. Taylor was an American artist active in the mid-twentieth century who contributed significantly to the Index of American Design, the Works Progress Administration project that employed artists to document American folk art and decorative culture through exacting watercolor renderings. The National Gallery of Art, which received the Index collection in 1943, holds seventy-one works by Taylor, making him one of the more extensively represented artists in the collection. His documented works include Wall Painting, Wall Painting and Door (Interior), as well as renderings of santos, spurs, furniture, and other decorative and functional objects — subjects that suggest his work centered on the material culture of the American Southwest and its distinctive blend of Spanish colonial and indigenous traditions.
The Index of American Design, active from 1935 to 1942, required its artists to produce renderings of scientific precision: each watercolor had to convey the texture, color, shadow, and construction of the object depicted, functioning as a visual record rather than an artistic interpretation. Taylor's range of subjects — from interior architectural details to hand-forged metal objects and carved religious figures — reflects the Index's commitment to documenting not just fine craft but the full spectrum of American material ingenuity. Working in watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, he brought the technical discipline the project demanded to a diverse body of regional subjects.
The objects Taylor documented, particularly those associated with Spanish colonial and Southwestern traditions, occupied a category of American cultural heritage that received renewed scholarly attention during the New Deal era. The Index's broader mission was to establish that American design had its own deep history and aesthetic richness, worthy of study and preservation. Taylor's seventy-one contributions to that mission place him among the more prolific contributors to the project. His works remain in the National Gallery's permanent collection as enduring visual records of American regional craftsmanship.
