Wooden Cross used as Headstone

Art Historical Context

This watercolor, colored pencil, graphite, and heightening rendering on paperboard, created around 1937 by Majel G. Claflin, captures a modest wooden cross used as a headstone. The original folk object stood just 29 inches high, and Claflin’s precise 14-by-10-inch sheet faithfully records its simple form, weathered texture, and rustic construction. Produced for the Index of American Design, the work belongs to a vast visual archive of American decorative and folk arts assembled during the Great Depression. The Index, a Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, employed hundreds of artists to document objects ranging from colonial furniture to vernacular crafts that might otherwise have vanished. Wooden grave markers like this one were common in rural American cemeteries where stone was scarce or expensive; they reflect the practical ingenuity and personal piety of everyday communities. Claflin’s meticulous mixed-media technique—typical of Index renderings—combines transparent washes with opaque heightening and fine graphite lines to achieve both accuracy and a sense of three-dimensional presence. Today the drawing serves as both historical record and quiet tribute to anonymous makers. It reminds visitors that American design history includes not only masterpieces of high craft but also humble, handmade memorials that once marked lives lived far from urban centers. Through such images the Index preserved a democratic vision of the nation’s material culture for future generations.

About the Artist

Majel G. Claflin · 1893–1941

Majel G. Claflin (1893–1941) was an American artist best known for her meticulous documentation of Spanish Colonial folk art from northern New Mexico. Active in Taos, New Mexico, during the late 1930s, she produced watercolor renderings as part of the Index of American Design, a Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration that aimed to catalog regional American crafts and tradition...