This Ed Blackwell painting of a threshing dinner not only includes the likenesses of four deans of agriculture, (Butz, Kohls, Thompson and Liska), but the artist as well. That's a young Blackwell (far right) taking in the entire scene. To find out who's who in this Blackwell painting, go to www.agriculture.purdue.edu/connections.

Picture a 1930s family farm and what happens there throughout the year. Your mind will conjure up many things about such a Hoosier homestead: basketball in a dimly lit barn, the sweaty threshing crew gathered round the table for dinner, Christmas with the family, and old farmers grouped around an even older tractor chewing the fat and telling lies.

Wait, was that an image you painted in your mind or was it a picture you saw hanging somewhere?

Four paintings depicting each of the four seasons over the course of a year in the life of the fictional Catalpa Hill Farm were created as gifts for people who donated money to Purdue Agriculture in the late 1980s. Prints of those paintings hang in a large variety of places, including the University of Kentucky office of Bill Sheets, BS '74, MS '77.

Sheets worked at Purdue for 13 years and was half of the two-person team that came up with the idea of using the paintings as a way to boost donations to the university.

Sheets estimates the program raised over $3 million. Most of the money went into scholarship endowments.

And the idea worked. According to Sheets, "We raised a fair amount of money with them."

The other person responsible for the idea and for the artistry of the paintings was Ed Blackwell, who died April 8, 2004, in Carmel, Ind., at the age of 78.

In the late '80s, Blackwell was looking for a way to cap off his 40-year career at Purdue, where he was an illustrator for the agricultural communication department. "Ed wanted to leave a legacy," Sheets says. "We thought there was a way we could put a fund-raising slant on it."

The idea of the paintings was agreed on about a year before Blackwell's planned retirement. But shortly after the agreement was reached, Blackwell, his wife, and his wife's parents were in an automobile accident while returning from a vacation in Florida. His wife's parents were killed and his wife was left with brain damage. Blackwell retired after the accident to care for his wife.

Photo provided Former Purdue illustrator Ed Blackwell, shown in 1986 working on a self-portrait, painted the Catalpa Farm series as a fund-raiser for the Purdue College of Agriculture.

Over the next four years, Blackwell painted The Four Seasons of Agriculture, one picture for each season in the year of 1939. The summer painting is of a threshing dinner, the fall painting is of a friendly game of basketball in the barn, the winter piece is of the family gathered by the Christmas tree, and the spring painting is of a group of people gathered around a new tractor.

When Blackwell needed models, he didn't just paint random people into the scenes - he wanted to base his drawings on real people. But because he was painting from home, he wasn't able to use the people he saw regularly in the office. Blackwell painted the people from photographs that Sheets took to him, and he painted the equipment from an old Sears catalog.

The two men wanted the paintings to be as accurate as possible, so Blackwell did a lot of research. Sheets also spent a lot of time driving around and taking pictures for Blackwell

to complete the pieces, including things like old pickup trucks and an old rocking chair seen in the threshing dinner picture. "I did a fair amount of legwork," Sheets says.

Each of the Four Seasons paintings includes people who are recognizable staples in the history of Purdue Agriculture beginning around 1940. Blackwell included Robert Thompson, Karl Brandt,

Earl Butz, Hank Wadsworth, Dave and Bea Pfendler, and Dick Kohls, to name just a few who are in the threshing dinner painting. But when Blackwell needed pictures of women and children to fill his canvas, he did what most fathers and husbands would do - he put his own wife and children in the paintings.

Because he portrayed well-known (and some unknown) people in the paintings, the prints became prized possessions not only for those who were in them, but also for others who wanted to own this piece of Purdue Agriculture history. And for the right price, anyone could have his or her own set of prints.

The price was a $500 donation per print, with no discount for people who wanted the complete set of four for $2,000. If that wasn't enough to satisfy your craving to donate, you could double the amount and Blackwell would personalize each print in the set by removing the standard Catalpa Hill Farm and replacing it with your farm's name.

Catalpa Hill Farm doesn't have any significance to Purdue other than it's a demonstration of creative thinking by Blackwell and Sheets. "I used to see a lot of farms with Catalpa in the name because of all of the catalpa trees around," Sheets says, "but as for the name, Ed and I just pulled that out of the air and went with it."

Each of the prints was numbered, and about 1,500 were printed. When the prints were being made in a print shop in Cincinnati, about 15 sets of the Four Seasons of Agriculture were held out as artist proofs for Blackwell to keep for himself and to give to his friends and family who were not directly related to Purdue Agriculture.

Three of the original paintings from which the prints were made are in Purdue's Agriculture Alumni Office, and the other original is in the office of the dean of agriculture.

Sheets has received compliments on the series that hung in his office at the University of Kentucky. He says he has seen the prints in a variety of locations, including a home in Florida occupied by a family that had recently moved there from West Lafayette.

Sheets, who grew up in the shadow of Purdue in Clinton County, says that, "my choices for college were either Purdue or Purdue."

After graduation, Sheets worked in Indianapolis for about five and a half years managing properties. He returned to Purdue as the first director of development for the College of Agriculture. He was there for 13 years before moving on to a few other careers, landing about six years ago at the University of Kentucky as the director for advancement.

Sheets and the Catulpa paintings recently moved to Colorado where he has been appointed Assistant Vice President for Advancement at Colorado State University.

Contact Sheets at wsheets@uky.edu