Child's Dress

Art Historical Context

This watercolor and graphite rendering of a child's dress, created around 1937 by Margaret Concha, belongs to the Index of American Design collection at the National Gallery of Art. The modest-sized work on paper (roughly 11 by 9 inches) captures the details of a historical garment through careful observation, reflecting the project's broader aim of documenting American decorative arts and everyday objects from earlier centuries. As part of this Depression-era initiative, artists produced precise illustrations to preserve the nation's craft and design heritage for educational purposes. Concha employed watercolor to suggest the fabric's color and texture while using graphite for fine structural lines, a combination typical of these documentary studies. The resulting image offers viewers a window into children's clothing of the past and underscores how such renderings helped celebrate and safeguard American cultural traditions during a time of national hardship.

About the Artist

Margaret Concha · 1897–1994

Margaret Concha is an artist whose life and career remain incompletely documented in the major scholarly literature on art history. No confirmed birth or death dates have been established, and details of her training, nationality, and primary working period are not reliably recorded in available sources. The works attributed to her suggest engagement with the visual traditions of her era, though ...