Santo

Art Historical Context

This 1936 rendering by Maude Valle, created in watercolor, colored pencil, and on paperboard, belongs to the Index of American Design, a landmark New Deal-era project that documented the nation’s folk and decorative arts. Valle’s precise illustration records a santo—a painted wooden saint figure typical of Hispanic religious tradition—faithfully capturing the original object’s modest scale of roughly 13½ by 17¾ inches. Produced under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Index employed hundreds of artists to create an archival visual record of American material culture from the colonial period onward. Valle’s mixed-media technique, combining transparent watercolor washes with the linear control of graphite and colored pencil, was characteristic of these renderings: they were intended to be both scientifically accurate and aesthetically compelling, preserving details of form, surface, and color that photography of the time could not fully convey. Santos such as the one depicted here were central to domestic and communal devotion in Spanish colonial and Mexican-American communities, especially in the Southwest. By recording them with such care, Valle and her fellow Index artists helped elevate everyday religious folk art into the national cultural narrative, ensuring that these humble yet spiritually potent objects remain accessible to later generations at the National Gallery of Art.