Flower Pot

Art Historical Context

**Flower Pot** (1937) by Charles Moss is a delicate watercolor and graphite rendering on paperboard, capturing the elegance of an everyday American ceramic object. Measuring 32.9 x 25.3 cm overall, it depicts a flower pot originally 7½ inches high and 6¼ inches in. Moss's precise lines and subtle color washes highlight the pot's graceful curves and modest decoration, transforming a humble household item into a study of form and function. Created as part of the Index of American Design (IAD), a New Deal-era Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration, this artwork reflects the 1930s effort to document and celebrate America's folk art and decorative traditions amid the Great Depression. Artists like Moss produced thousands of such detailed plates to preserve cultural heritage, emphasizing regional craftsmanship in ceramics and everyday design. Housed in the National Gallery of Art's collection, **Flower Pot** exemplifies the IAD's mission to honor vernacular beauty. Its watercolor technique—layered for depth and realism—brings the tactile quality of clay to life on paper, inviting visitors to appreciate the artistry in ordinary objects that shaped American homes.

About the Artist

Charles Moss · 1855–present

Charles Moss is an artist whose work appears in museum collections in notable quantity, attesting to a sustained and recognized practice even though the biographical details — his dates, nationality, and the particular tradition in which he was trained — have not been thoroughly recorded in the art-historical literature currently available. The name Charles Moss is common enough to pose identifica...