Stockings

Art Historical Context

This watercolor and graphite work on paperboard, titled *Stockings*, was created around 1937 by Sylvia Dezon. Measuring about 12 by 9 inches, it belongs to the Index of American Design collection at the National Gallery of Art. The Index was a New Deal-era project of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, in which artists produced precise visual records of American decorative arts, crafts, and everyday objects from the colonial period through the early 1900s. Dezon’s rendering captures the texture, construction, and subtle patterning of stockings with the combination of transparent watercolor washes and fine graphite lines typical of Index artists. These documentary illustrations were not intended as original compositions but as faithful, almost scientific records that preserved the appearance of objects that might otherwise be lost or overlooked. Textiles such as stockings offered especially rich subjects, revealing both practical craftsmanship and changing ideas of fashion and material culture. Created during the Great Depression, the Index employed hundreds of artists while assembling a national visual archive of American design heritage. Works like this one continue to serve scholars, designers, and museum visitors as windows onto the skill of both historic makers and the talented illustrators who recorded their work with such care and clarity.

About the Artist

Sylvia Dezon · 1906–1970

Sylvia Dezon is an artist whose biographical details remain largely undocumented in accessible art historical sources. Her nationality, dates of birth and death, artistic training, and the broader arc of her career have not been established in the scholarly record available at this time. Where her works appear in museum collections or exhibition records, they demonstrate an individual artistic vo...