Coat

Art Historical Context

This watercolor, graphite, and gouache rendering titled *Coat*, created by Margaret Concha between 1935 and 1942, forms part of the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art. Measuring approximately 12 by 9 inches, the work exemplifies the precise documentary style used to capture American objects with remarkable fidelity. The Index of American Design was a New Deal initiative under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. During the Great Depression, artists produced thousands of detailed illustrations of decorative arts, folk crafts, and historical artifacts spanning colonial times to the early 20th century. Concha’s depiction of a coat belongs to this visual archive, which recorded clothing, textiles, and everyday items to preserve America’s material culture. Watercolor provided luminous color and texture, graphite supplied fine outlines, and gouache added opaque highlights—techniques that allowed artists to achieve lifelike accuracy. These renderings offered both employment for artists in difficult times and an enduring resource for historians, designers, and the public, celebrating the richness of American craftsmanship.

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 ...