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| Stroud Farm (detail) |
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...Mort Künstler painted Stroud Farm in 1976?
After receiving a commission in 1974 to paint two scenes of wheat farming, Mort Künstler spent several weeks in Kansas and Nebraska doing research for the paintings. The paintings were sold to the Hesston Corporation, a farm machinery manufacturer based in Hesston, Kansas. By 1976, he had signed a contract with a publisher of limited edition prints to do four paintings a year. For his first, he chose this scene of threshing wheat as it might have looked in 1917. The painting was conceived as a tribute to the historian-farmer Vaden Stroud who helped Künstler on his research two years earlier. Künstler called the painting Stroud Farm. It became his very first limited edition print and it sold then for $25.00. It resells today for more than $400.00! In 1990, Stroud Farm was made into a plate by the Danbury Mint. At that time, Künstler was primarily focused on the Civil War and didn’t want his collectors to think he was distracted and therefore, less interested in this area. The plate was issued under the pseudonym of Emmett Kaye. When the farm paintings were equally well received and it didn’t diminish his Civil War endeavors, he went away from the pseudonym. It launched a series of plates that became one of the most successful series in the history of the Danbury Mint!
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