Child's Dress

Art Historical Context

This delicate rendering of a child's dress, created around 1937 by artist Ray Price, forms part of the Index of American Design, a remarkable New Deal-era project housed at the National Gallery of. Produced under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, the Index employed hundreds of artists to create precise visual records of American decorative arts, folk crafts, and everyday objects spanning from the colonial period through the early 20th century. Rather than an original fashion design, this work documents an existing historical garment, capturing its form, texture, and construction with scholarly care. The use of watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on paper allowed artists like Price to achieve extraordinary accuracy and subtlety. These mixed-media techniques produced luminous, almost photographic illustrations that preserved details of fabric, stitching, and ornamentation that might otherwise have been lost to time. During the Great Depression, the project served both as employment for artists and as a patriotic effort to celebrate and archive the nation's material heritage at a moment when many feared it was vanishing. Today these Index plates remain invaluable to historians, costume scholars, and designers. They offer an intimate window into the clothing of American children in earlier centuries and stand as quiet testaments to the skill of the WPA artists who translated three-dimensional objects into enduring two-dimensional records. Visitors can appreciate both the vanished world of handmade children's wear and the Depression-era determination to safeguard it for future generations.

About the Artist

Ray Price · 1855–present

Ray Price was an American artist active around 1935, renowned for his meticulous watercolor renderings of everyday American objects and crafts. His oeuvre, comprising 88 works held in the National Gallery of Art collection, captures the functional beauty of vernacular items from the late 1930s through the late 1940s. Little is known about Price's early life or formal training, as biographical deta...