Box

Art Historical Context

This watercolor, graphite, and gouache rendering of a box, created around 1936 by Sylvia Dezon, belongs to the Index of American Design. That New Deal project, now in the National Gallery of Art, hired artists during the Great Depression to produce precise visual records of American decorative arts, folk crafts, and everyday objects. Dezon used mixed media on paperboard to capture the object’s form, surface, and color with documentary accuracy. Watercolor and gouache supplied rich, layered hues while graphite added fine linear detail—techniques typical of the Index’s goal of creating reliable, lasting illustrations of items that might otherwise fade from view. These works not only employed artists but also formed a visual encyclopedia of national material culture. Dezon’s “Box” thus offers viewers a window onto earlier American craftsmanship and the era’s effort to honor and preserve it.

About the Artist

Sylvia Dezon · 1906–1970

Sylvia Dezon is an artist whose biographical details remain largely undocumented in accessible art historical sources. Her nationality, dates of birth and death, artistic training, and the broader arc of her career have not been established in the scholarly record available at this time. Where her works appear in museum collections or exhibition records, they demonstrate an individual artistic vo...