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Biography: Robert Darr Wert & Country PrintsScope 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.
Remembered today as a modern folk artist, he was born on an Ohio farm in 1915, and attended commercial art school in Cleveland, eventually landing in the Pioneer Valley of northern Massachusetts and founding Country Prints in 1947.
His modern interpretation of rural American themes was expressed on a wide range of household products, from table linens to tiles, framed prints and more, most of which were silkscreen printed by hand on imported linen. Wert’s designs proved popular, and Country Prints’ sales volume increased throughout the 1950’s, reaching an apex in the mid-1960’s.
His unexpected death at age fifty in 1966 brought the popular business to an untimely end. His family worked to continue the enterprise, finally closing it in 1969.
Wert was an incredibly ambitious artist. This website documents over 1,200 designs in more than a dozen product categories developed between 1947 and 1966.
“If yesterday’s craftsmen looked me over, they’d feel at home.”
-Robert Darr Wert