Dress c. 1937

Mary E. Humes created this watercolour drawing titled 'Dress,' rendering a garment with careful attention to its form and detail. The composition, divided between a fully realized dress and a faint outline of a similar design, offers a play between presence and absence. The use of tonal variations to model the fabric's folds gives the dress a sculptural quality, emphasizing its three-dimensionality. The puffed sleeves and fitted bodice present a distinct silhouette, characteristic of fashion trends during the artist’s lifetime. The muted palette contributes to the work's quiet, reflective mood, allowing viewers to focus on the texture and structure of the dress. The existence of two dresses on one plane raises interesting questions about representation and reality. Is this the same dress but viewed with a different perspective, or an echo, a double? This duality invites us to consider the interplay between sketch and substance, idea and manifestation.