Clothes Pin Basket

Art Historical Context

Clothes Pin Basket is a precise rendering created around 1938 by Herndon Hightower in watercolor, graphite, and colored pencil on paper. Measuring just over 8 by 11 inches, this work belongs to the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art, a collection devoted to documenting American crafts and decorative objects. It depicts a half-peck size clothes pin basket, a practical household item once used to store wooden clothespins. Hightower’s mixed-media approach allowed for both structural accuracy and subtle color, capturing the woven form and texture of this everyday object. Such renderings were created to preserve the appearance of vernacular American designs that might otherwise fade from memory. The clothes pin basket itself reflects the ingenuity of folk crafts, where functional containers were made with care and skill for daily laundry routines. As part of a larger effort to record the nation’s material culture, this illustration highlights how ordinary items carried both utility and quiet artistry. It invites viewers to appreciate the handmade objects that shaped American domestic life and the dedicated artists who documented them with remarkable fidelity.

About the Artist

Herndon Hightower · 1916–1961

Herndon Hightower (1916–1961) was an American artist whose surviving works consist of precise watercolor renderings created for the Index of American Design, a Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Active during the late 1930s, he contributed to this nationwide effort to document the decorative and utilitarian arts of the United States from the colonial period through the ninet...