Name/Title
Biography: Part 1Scope and Content
Mid-Century American: Robert Darr Wert & Country Prints
“By a quiet country road under great maples, high above the valley of the Connecticut, sits a low red barn. Here, with the help of friendly neighbors, COUNTRY PRINTS by Robert Darr Wert are made - almost entirely by hand.”
So begins the text on table linen packaging written and illustrated by Robert Darr Wert for his rural silkscreen workshop, Country Prints, of Gill, Massachusetts. Known to all as Bob, he is remembered today as a modern folk artist whose work celebrated early American rural life. He was a multi-talented man passionate about the tools, artifacts and ways of early America and how to use them as enhancements of mid-twentieth century life.
His workshop and family home in a thoughtfully converted dairy barn set within a 150 acre organic farm was a laboratory for practicing the ways of early handwork, employing high standards of workmanship. Most of the equipment for cutting, printing, finishing, and framing silkscreen printed linen was developed on site. Modern tools were added to aid efficiency: sewing machines for finishing table linens, a spray booth for painting picture frames, and a curing oven for heat-setting the silkscreen printed linens. Even the barn’s silo was adapted for hanging lengths of printed fabric to dry.
Along with his prodigious talents as an artist and leader of a vibrant workshop of “Country Printers” consisting of family, friends and neighbors, Bob was a loving and kind husband to Peg and father to children Sara and Jerry. An exceedingly honest and hard working man, he was also an ardent organic farmer, a knowledgeable collector of early American antiques, a patent holder, a folk musician, a voracious consumer of books and coffee, an avid birder, a woodcarver and craftsman. A friend to all he met, he was a leader in the nearby Unitarian Universalist Church, a supporter of democratic political candidates, an outspoken pacifist against the Vietnam war, and a member of organizations dedicated to the understanding and preservation of history, art, and nature. He never owned a television, as his life and interests were too full to want one.
Humble Beginnings
Descended from a long lineage of Pennsylvania “Dutch” German farmers, Bob Wert’s grandfather moved to central Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1915, Bob was born on a farm in Bucyrus. His artistic abilities were not apparent in childhood. Instead, he was fascinated by airplanes. As a boy in the 1920’s, when not doing farm chores or schoolwork, he built model airplanes and pedaled his bike to the local airfield to study planes firsthand and observe takeoffs and landings. He dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. A high school teacher encouraged his abilities, and upon graduation he was accepted into the aeronautical engineering program at the University of Michigan, entering in the fall of 1933. In the depths of the Depression, the rapidly growing field of aeronautics offered a promising future.
Retail Display Work and Art School
His time at the university proved difficult and unhappy, and he left at the end of his first year. He landed work in retail store display at a Toledo, Ohio, department store. After a year, the head of the department encouraged Bob to develop his artistic abilities, which came as a surprise, since he didn’t consider himself artistic. In the summer of 1935, he enrolled in a six week immersive art program at the Cleveland School of Art. His instructors were enthusiastic about their new student’s abilities and encouraged him to join the school’s Commercial Art program, which he did immediately.
Bob worked his way through art school as a shoe salesman and short order cook, and he set up a small workshop to design and build retail store displays. School was often interrupted by his need to work for a living, but his professional efforts paid off. Before he was able to graduate, his displays for local Thom McAn Shoe stores were noticed and he was hired in 1940 to become the assistant store display manager for McAn’s parent company, the Melville Shoe Corporation, at their New York City headquarters.
Life in the Big City
Once in New York, Bob worked for Melville during the day and continued his art education at night at the Grand Central School of Art, spending as much free time as possible in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His keen eye was drawn to the spare nature and functionality of early American antiques and artifacts. He drew parallels between these items and the inherent simplicity of the modernist design movement that permeated architecture, design and art in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Later, his artwork became a distillation of early American antiques, Pennsylvania “Dutch” folk art, and the prevailing modernism in art and graphic design.
In his first year in New York, his love of the countryside drew him to bicycling trips in New England. On one such trip to Connecticut, he met Margaret (Peg) Dean, who worked in the travel department at American Youth Hostels of Northfield, Massachusetts. The connection between Bob and Peg was immediate and they married in her hometown of Lincoln, Massachusetts, in November 1941. Peg joined Bob in New York, where she eventually worked in the editorial rooms at the Girl Scouts of America headquarters.
Through no fault of his own, his position was eliminated after two years with Melville Shoes. Undeterred, in mid-1942 Bob was hired as a designer at Jenter Exhibits and Displays, the largest and most prestigious display firm on the east coast, with a range of clients including Revere Copper and Brass, Chesterfield Cigarettes and General Electric. At Jenter, his biggest and most enjoyable assignment was the design of the the general showrooms for Revere in New York City, makers of the famed RevereWare cookware line. Research for the project took him back to the Met’s American Wing and to Boston, where he visited the Paul Revere House and studied some of the silversmith’s surviving work displayed there.
He’s in the Army Now
At age 29 in 1945, Bob was drafted for service in World War II. He entered the army in April, reporting to Fort Dix, New Jersey. He quickly shipped out for basic training at Camp Croft, South Carolina. In his first week he broke his left arm in a fall, ending any possibility of deploying for the war. Once healed, he bought a second-hand guitar and began learning folk songs in the tradition of early folk revivalists Burl Ives, John Allan Lomax, John Jacob Niles, and Richard Dyer Bennet. Like his musical heroes, he was known to “collect” folk songs, learning them directly from people in the hills and mountains near the army camp. Back at Fort Benning at the end of his tour, he entertained the troops with folk songs several times at the base’s radio station.
Bob was transferred to four different army camps and bases in less than eighteen months. At Camp Robinson, Arkansas, his commercial art background led to an assignment designing and producing silkscreen printed posters and training aids, giving him time to experiment with the medium that would lead to the founding of Country Prints. Had he never broken his arm, Country Prints would not have existed.
The Founding of Country Prints
Soon after his discharge in late 1946, Bob and Peg pooled resources with best friends Fritz and Allison Kaufhold and purchased a farmhouse in rural Northfield, Massachusetts. At the time, Fritz was the travel director of American Youth Hostels, Peg’s former employer, and Allison was a local school teacher. The Kaufholds and their young son Peter occupied the first floor of the house, Bob and Peg lived on the second floor, and the attic was converted to a silkscreen printing workshop. Founded in 1948, Country Prints initially involved the efforts of both couples.
Applying a modern interpretation of early American motifs and Pennsylvania “Dutch” folk art, the appealing nature of Bob’s inaugural prints was an almost immediate success. His artwork was inspired by his family’s Pennsylvania “Dutch” ancestry and his growing collections of early American hand blown glass, painted tin, carved wood buttermolds, woodenware, and hand forged iron tools and hardware.
Under his eye, Pennsylvania “Dutch” folk art iconography was simplified and streamlined, with brightened colors still true to the source. He depicted antiques in the manner of folk art: flat elevation views, never in perspective, with objects arranged in proportion to one another in compositions reminiscent of museum displays. The results were earnest and striking, but not precious or overly sentimental. He showed a practiced and proficient hand in his artwork, while still experimenting and trying to find the best artistic fit for his ideas.
Produced almost entirely by hand and applied to kitchen towels, wallhangings, potholders, cocktail napkins, placemat sets and framed prints, these early products and hand methods set
the foundation for Country Prints’ continued operations. The tag line on the business’s hand-printed Northfield stationary summed up Bob’s vision: “tradition for today”.
Bob also established the company trademark at this time, one that remained consistent for two decades: a plucky red rooster drawn in silhouette, standing within “Country Prints” in a font reminiscent of late 19th century “country store” typefaces. He began using the trademark in 1948, and was granted trademark protection by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1955.
It appears that much of Country Prints’ early output was unsigned. However, Bob quickly began applying his signature as “wert”, “r. darr wert”, “wert - by hand”, “wert - Country Prints”, and various other combinations.
The Young Workshop Expands
Striving to distribute his prints, Bob learned quickly that he could either produce the work, or act as a salesman, but he couldn’t do both. In a fortuitous coincidence, his prints were noticed at a local craft show by Stanley Churchill of nearby Greenfield, an established home goods salesman working throughout New England. Churchill and The Churchill Company quickly became Country Prints’ first independent sales agent, a key partnership in the company’s success. Stanley remained Country Prints’ lead salesman until 1959.
Orders began rolling in, and it was soon necessary to hire neighbors to fulfill demand. With orders stacking up and too many hands in a small workshop, a G.I. loan was secured to purchase an abandoned farm in nearby Gill, and plans were implemented to convert the former dairy barn to a workshop and home for the Werts, with the Kaufholds taking the farmhouse across the road. The Werts soon welcomed children Sara and Jerry, and the Kaufhold’s son John joined older brother Peter. The four children were raised as a blended family with two sets of parents, all equally welcome in both homes. The Werts also had loyal Collies, dogs that Peg appreciated for their innate ability to watch over the children.
A Larger Home for Country Prints
In Gill, the conversion of the dairy barn was an exercise in Yankee ingenuity implemented in carefully considered phases, with most of the work performed by the Werts, Kaufholds and friends. The most immediate need was an expanded silkscreen studio. With an “L” shaped floor plan, the main section of the barn was a traditional three story gambrel-roofed structure for housing milking cows and equipment below, with a hayloft above.
Attached at a right angle to the barn was a one-story milking shed. This was immediately converted to the new silkscreen studio with tall windows for natural light, and a long continuous silkscreen workbench running the length of the space. The former milking stalls were the perfect width for hanging large rolls of imported linen, and the tall silo was eventually utilized for drying continuous lengths of printed fabric. Later, its base was converted to a clever curing oven for heat-setting the inks on the printed linens.
Once the silkscreen studio was operational, the main section of the barn was modernized by converting the gambrel roof to a gable roof punctuated by a large second story dormer. Lumber from the conversion of the roof was reused to mitigate costs. One end of the first floor was designated for administrative offices and inventory, with a large area for prepping orders, shipping, and receiving.
The walk-out basement housed a spray booth for painting picture frames, an area for assembling framed prints, and a woodworking shop for fabricating silkscreen printing frames and making other necessary wooden equipment, like the wheeled dollies used to transport heavy stacks of printed linen from one area to another.
Situated between the silkscreen studio and the administrative area, the Wert’s home occupied two floors at the center of the barn. The complex was heated with three large manually fed wood-burning furnaces that required stoking multiple times a day during the winter months. Large, running stacks of hand split cord wood populated the front and back yards of the barn almost year round. The Werts and Kaufholds continued to live in the Northfield house until the barn and farmhouse were complete enough to live in, though more work needed to be done in each.
Work and Life at Country Prints
Once established in Gill in 1950, Bob managed the artwork, screen production and product development while Fritz became the full time business manager overseeing the company’s administrative and financial matters.
For a small workshop with as many as sixteen employees during the peak summer production season, and as few as eight or ten in the off-season, Country Prints produced an impressive array of products that included placemat sets, tablecloths, table runners, cocktail napkins, notecards, framed and unframed prints, breadboards, calendar towels, kitchen towels, aprons, kitchen accessories, wallhangings, tote bags, neck ties, and tiles.
The tradition of handwork at Country Prints was emphasized in a number of practices. Bob insisted on hand cutting the stencils for the silkscreens even though photo-mechanical processes were widely available, the textile inks (or “paints” as they were called in the workshop) were hand mixed from shop-made color formula cards, fabrics were hand cut by the thread, silkscreen printing was operated by hand rather than by machine, table linens were individually machine sewn and hand fringed, and small linen prints were hand glued onto notecards.
The atmosphere in the Country Prints workshop was one of informality and quiet handwork. With little internal hierarchy, the Country Printers were skilled at multiple tasks, working efficiently to produce high quality products that delighted retailers and customers from coast to coast. An in-house gift shop invited visitors to view the silkscreen process and tour the Wert’s organic farm where the plants were labeled with Bob’s hand painted plant markers. It wasn’t unusual for Bob to engage in animated conversation with visitors, sometimes surprising Peg by inviting them to family meals. Every afternoon, “coffee time” was a cherished institution offering a short break and a chance for the staff to refresh and catch up on each other’s lives, fostering a comradery unique to Country Prints.
When Country Prints opened in Gill in 1950, the town’s 1,070 residents were employed primarily on farms, in local mills, and at the railroad. Country Prints offered a unique employment opportunity. The informal atmosphere and the opportunity to learn multiple skills to maintain interest resulted in a staff that remained loyal to Bob and Fritz. It was common for employees to remain for years, and for summer employees, like schoolteacher Polly Plaisted, to return season after season. One young man, Ed Stafford, started at Country Prints upon graduating from high school and remained for nearly two decades, learning almost every aspect of the business.
By the mid-1950’s, Bob’s artistic style had solidified. Able to design in a range from loose to tightly drafted, his work was bold and confident, his compositions detailed and active. Along with antiques and Pennsylvania “Dutch” iconography, depictions of herb plants became part of his visual language. Still working in flat imagery consistent with folk art, some of the work was clearly influenced by the prevailing abstract art movement. He developed collages of antiques in overlapping outlines and silhouettes, sometimes with applied elements, like the designs found on painted tin or slipware, floating free of their vessels. A number of times throughout his career, Bob’s family was represented in his artwork by a farmer and his wife, with a daughter and son nearby.
Developing a Country Prints Design
Speaking of the historical inspiration for his work in 1956, Bob said, “There is nothing creative in copying the past. It should serve only as inspiration. One doesn’t have to live on a self-invented frontier to get the feel of the past, either. But you should understand the functional purpose for which these things were crafted and impart this attitude to whatever you produce.”
With this in mind, Bob gathered his collections and reference books for inspiration and worked directly on cardboard cut to the actual size of the intended finished product, like towels, wallhangings or tiles. He began with a loose pencil sketch, which was edited and refined, then brought to life with paint. From there he began the process of cutting a silkscreen stencil for each color in the painting; in general, if the artwork had three colors, the finished print required three screens, four colors required four screens, etc. The number of screens needed for Bob’s designs ranged from as few as one, to an ambitious eight.
Each stencil was adhered to a silkscreen with solvents. The cut areas of the stencil allowed ink to be forced through the silkscreen mesh with a large squeegee tool, printing on the material below. To avoid smudging, each color was allowed to dry before the next color was printed. Once complete, the print was heat-set for permanence.
During this period, prints were signed in variations of “robert darr wert”, “r. darr wert”, “wert - by hand” and “wert COUNTRY PRINTS”. By the late 1950’s, his signature was standardized as “wert - by hand” with or without “COUNTRY PRINTS”. This was maintained into the 1960’s.
Christmas Prints
Perhaps the the most exuberant examples of Bob’s artwork are his Christmas notecards, wallhangings, and cocktail napkins. Layered with imagery and symbolism celebrating both the religious and secular joys of the holiday, his Christmas prints stand out with subjects ranging from illustrated Christmas carols, to Bible passages, to holiday decorating and baking. Some prints, like the “Christmas Kitchen” wallhangings, hint at his own family’s holiday traditions.
Aside from the Christmas prints available through retailers, from Country Prints’ inception Bob produced annual Christmas greetings to send in gratitude to the company’s retailers, suppliers, and sales representatives. Not available to the general public, these joyous custom greetings were dated and often signed from “Robert Darr Wert and the Country Printers”. He usually produced two versions each year, the second with his family’s names imprinted for mailing to extended family, friends and neighbors.
National Exposure: Growing Country Prints
To place Country Prints in historical context, it must be mentioned that its growth and success were directly tied to the post World War II rise of the middle class, the expansion of suburban development, and America’s new-found affluence, all resulting in a boom in manufacturing nationwide. The home furnishings market expanded in time with the rapid growth of the suburbs. This period embraced America’s new identity as a world leader and was a time of great optimism, fostering interest in, and nostalgia for, American history and antiques while embracing streamlined modernity. Bob’s buoyant, modern interpretations of American subject matter were primed for enthusiastic acceptance in the home furnishings market of the day.
In the early 1950’s, a team of independent Country Prints sales representatives was developed. Headed by Stanley Churchill, the sales team distributed Country Prints throughout the 48 contiguous states. Among the sales representatives remembered today, Stanley represented the Northeast, George and Yvonne Fairchild of Tenafly, New Jersey, covered the mid-Atlantic states, and Ruth Gauss Flynn of Cascades, Washington, maintained the Northwest and West Coast. For further market expansion, Country Prints was represented at annual industry gift shows at convention centers in major cities including Boston, New York and Chicago.
As a direct result, business volume grew steadily throughout the 1950’s. A network of hundreds of retailers was established nationwide, from small boutiques, country stores, gift shops, framing galleries, furniture showrooms, and museum shops, to large department stores like Coulter’s in Los Angeles, Marshall Field in Chicago, and Macy’s in New York City. Bob’s work was exhibited in art galleries and at least two museums. Historic sites, museums and corporate clients commissioned custom wallhangings, table linens, and tiles themed to their businesses.
Design partnerships were established with at least three outside companies. In 1956, placemat sets and baby bibs were produced to match china by Arabia Finland. This was likely done solely for Twining and Buck, a high-end home furnishings retailer in Salisbury, Connecticut, that had relationships with both Country Prints and Arabia Finland upon opening in 1950. During the same period, the Bucilla needlework kit company produced numerous cross stitch kits based on three Country Prints designs. Kits for a quilt, tablecloth, napkins, a sampler and several other kitchen accessories were produced.
Bob and Country Prints appeared often in local and national media. In December 1949, less than two years after the company’s founding, a retail column in the New York Times featured a photo and description of an early placemat set. Locally, the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette and The Springfield Sunday Republican published stories on the unique operation in Gill. Three framed Country Prints appeared in the 1952 how-to book “Block Printing on Fabrics”, by Florence Harvey Pettit, with whom Bob later taught a textile printing workshop at the prestigious Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine.
Bob demonstrated the silkscreen process in a detailed multi-page spread for Woman’s Day magazine in February 1954. The year before, Fortune magazine’s monthly column on successful small businesses profiled Country Prints and was later included in Fortune’s book “100 Stories of Business Success” alongside the invention of the Slinky and the Sno-Cat. The art journal Design published an informative cover story about Country Prints in 1956, followed by product profiles in 1957 and 1958. Throughout this time, Country Prints products were described in numerous retail shopping columns and Associated Press articles in newspapers nationwide.
Outside the Workshop: The Wert’s Organic Farm
The busy Country Prints workshop was nestled within 150 acres of farmland on River Road bordering the Connecticut River. Decades before the term “organic” became part of the common lexicon, Bob’s avocation and passion was to live the life of an organic farmer. His reward for a long day at the drawing table was to step outside and work the land.
Upon purchasing the farm it was discovered the land was fallow, exhausted by generations of harvests. The land’s fertility was redeemed without chemical inputs. Instead, Bob used time-honored practices of enrichment with manure, and the planting of winter cover crops to be tilled under in spring. Organic farming practices were learned firsthand through research, trial and error, and family trips to visit Pennsylvania “Dutch” farms. Bob instituted the ancient practice of drying hay by stacking it in “shocks” where it was cut in the fields rather than bailing it by machine. Shocks of hay and wheat appear often in his artwork.
Spring was the time for tilling and planting, wild and cultivated berries were picked and made into preserves throughout the summer, and Peg’s kitchen became a small canning factory during the harvest season. The barn complex’s three wood-fired furnaces required a near constant need for the cutting, splitting and stacking of cord wood. From an early age, the children took part in every aspect of farm life, tending the animals, picking fruits and vegetables, helping in the fields and assisting in the kitchen.
Bob and Peg avoided all pesticides and herbicides in their farming by practicing companion planting, encouraging beneficial insects, and heavily mulching the gardens. Bob expended considerable time and energy fighting the local authorities to prevent the broadcast spraying of the pesticide DDT over their land. Before Rachel Carson’s 1962 book,“Silent Spring”, awakened the general public to the hazards of chemical pesticides, Bob was a guest speaker in panel discussions about the dangers of DDT and other pesticides.
His concern for the environment extended to the minimal use of hazardous chemicals in the Country Prints workshop. Turpentine, a solvent necessary for cleaning inks from silkscreens each day, was conserved and used repeatedly. When no longer effective, it was disposed of by a hazardous waste contractor rather than being dumped on the land or in the river as was a common business practice before the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
The 1960’s: Country Prints at its Peak
By the early 1960’s Bob’s artistic style reached maturity. His compositions remained highly active, but his illustrations became more detailed, and the linework more consistent. Antiques, buildings, plants, and people were regularly drawn in perspective, almost entirely abandoning the flat folk art style of his earlier work.
At the same time, his talent for developing suites of products culminated in well-planned groups of coordinated kitchen accessories and attractive “Country Store” boxed gift sets of matching towels, aprons and tiles. Country Prints packaging and brochures adopted the tag line, “From Yesterday, For Today”, emphasizing the modern qualities of Bob’s Americana-themed work. The company’s efforts were celebrated when one of his custom designed gift boxes won a national packaging award from the National Paper Box Manufacturer’s Association in 1963.
In 1961, Bob was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for his design of a tall rectangular box clock with a silkscreen printed linen face. Three designs of this clock, along with several other non-patented designs by Bob, were produced by General Electric’s Clocks Division in the early to mid 1960’s.
Sales continued to expand. While maintaining a network of independent sales representatives and regularly participating in wholesale gift shows, during this time Country Prints was increasingly represented in wholesale gift showrooms nationally. By the mid-1960’s, permanent Country Prints displays were installed in thirteen gift markets in cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles.
As teenagers in the 1960’s, Sara and Jerry became more involved in the Country Prints workshop after school and on weekends. Sara loaded and unloaded the curing oven, packaged table linens, folded thousands of towels, and assisted customers in the gift shop. Jerry became a trusted and skilled printer, color mixer, stencil cutter, and silkscreen frame fabricator.
Beyond the workshop, for several years running Country Prints exhibited at the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts, a large country fair representing the rural enterprises and industry of the northeastern states. The company presented engaging exhibits, sold it’s products to eager fair-goers, and Bob gave many demonstrations of the silkscreen printing process to interested crowds.
Country Prints products also received the honor of being chosen for the New England Country Store at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. A popular destination within the New England States Pavilion, the venue was a faithful reproduction of an old-time general store. The proprietors, the Dunfee Family of New England hotel fame, selected only the finest made-in-New-England products to be represented at the World’s Fair, which welcomed 51.6 million visitors in its two year run. Country Prints items sold at the fair bore the custom imprint, “New England Country Store, New York World’s Fair, The Dunfee Family, Prop.”.
Today, the regular appearance of Country Prints’ 1960’s products in online auction listings suggests this was the company’s period of highest sales volume. After years of diligent work and creativity, the company had hit its commercial stride.
See Part 2 for conclusion…