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Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Precious Moments collectible figurines ignited a world gathering frenzy and made him a rich man, and whose Christian religion spurred him to construct his personal model of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Mo., died on May 20 at his house there. He was 85.
His loss of life was confirmed by his son Jon.
Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his cute snub-nosed Precious Moments characters had been “the Beanie Babies of porcelain,” as The Wall Street Journal as soon as put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered within the tons of of hundreds, constructed rooms for his or her Precious Moments collectible figurines, convened in regional golf equipment and made pilgrimages to Carthage, the place they slept within the Precious Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled on the Precious Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined within the Precious Moments meals courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage additionally hosted Precious Moments weddings.)
For a time, the Precious Moments Care-a-Van — an 18-wheeler kitted out like a museum, full of collectible figurines and dioramas that advised Mr. Butcher’s life story — toured the nation. There had been tons of and tons of of Precious Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting playing cards, books and a kids’s Bible. At the corporate’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ world retail gross sales reached over $500 million every year, a surprising quantity for a person who was as soon as so poor that he struggled to purchase groceries for his seven kids.
Mr. Butcher, whose followers sought him out on the Precious Moments compound to autograph their collectible figurines and posters (he at all times carried two pens to take action), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a rumpled determine sometimes clad in bluejeans and a T-shirt, with paint in his bushy hair and a shy smile.
“Most folks simply assume I’m the gardener,” he stated.
Mr. Butcher had been working with a world nondenominational ministry for kids, instructing and illustrating Bible tales, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, started making inspirational greeting playing cards and posters that includes his winsome characters within the early Seventies. “I got here up with ‘Precious’ and he got here up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher advised The Kansas City Star in 1995.
At a commerce present the 2 males attended, Eugene Freedman, president of the Enesco Group, a giftware firm based mostly in Illinois, noticed the waifish kids that they had created and thought that they had industrial potential as collectible figurines — opponents, maybe, for these made by the veteran collectibles large Hummel. When Yasuhei Fujioka, the Japanese sculptor Mr. Freedman commissioned to translate Mr. Butcher’s characters into porcelain, made the primary figurine, a boy and lady cuddled up on a tree stump with the title “Love One Another,” Mr. Butcher later stated, he fell to his knees and wept.
In 1978, Enesco launched 21 characters. By 1995, the corporate stated, Precious Moments had been the No. 1 collectible on this planet.
In 1984, Mr. Butcher was residing in Michigan and touring to his factories in Asia when, he stated, God directed him to construct a chapel. Driving house from a enterprise journey to Arizona, he took a detour to search for a website. He stopped in Carthage for the evening — he was hungry and drained and wanted gasoline — and the subsequent morning, as he advised it, God stated, “You are right here.”
He purchased 17½ acres, to which he would add through the years. He’d been to Rome and seen the Sistine Chapel, and that was his inspiration for the 9,000-square-foot shrine he constructed, which he coated with 84 murals, together with bronze panels and stained-glass home windows. It took 4 years to construct; Mr. Butcher usually labored, as Michelangelo had, flat on his again, suspended on scaffolding, portray the tales of the Bible from the creation to the resurrection. But in contrast to Michelangelo, who was recognized for his muscular figures, Mr. Butcher peopled his chapel together with his signature sprites. And he allowed himself some artistic leeway.
For his depiction of the primary day of creation, from the Book of Genesis — the half the place God stated, “Let there be mild” — Mr. Butcher painted three angels armed with flashlights. For Day Four, when God made the heavens, Mr. Butcher painted an angelic basketball staff he referred to as the Shooting Stars.
Other areas of the chapel are extra sober. In Hallelujah Square, a crowd favourite, dozens of angels are proven getting into heaven, a few of them impressed by the terminally unwell kids who had visited the chapel with their dad and mom, and whose likenesses Mr. Butcher painted after their deaths. He constructed a room he devoted to his son Philip, who died in 1990, and a tower for his son Tim, who died in 2012. A e-book of remembrances on the chapel is full of the names of holiday makers’ family members, together with prayers and notes: “My granddaddy and aunt died,” a younger lady named Jenni wrote, in line with an article in The Baltimore Sun in 1998. “And my cat Midnight ran away.”
Samuel John Butcher was born on New Year’s Day, 1939, in Jackson, Mich., one among 5 kids of Leon Butcher, who owned a gasoline station, and Evelyn (Khoury) Butcher.
Sam grew up in Redding, Calif., and commenced portray when he was 5. Money was tight and the household funds didn’t stretch to artwork provides, so he used rolls of paper salvaged from the native dump and leftover automotive paint from his father’s enterprise. Encouraged by his highschool artwork teacher, he gained a scholarship to the California College of the Arts, which was then based mostly in Oakland.
He married Katie Cushman, a good friend from highschool, in 1959; her father bought a cow to pay for the marriage. When she had their first youngster, Jon, in 1962, Sam dropped out of school and labored, variously, as a janitor; in a wallpaper store, the place he made window shows; and as a cook dinner in a pancake home.
The couple started attending an area Baptist church, and one Sunday Mr. Butcher walked off with a hymnal by mistake. The guilt he felt sparked one thing in him; by the next Sunday, he was a convert.
They divorced in 1987 (however remained shut), and Mr. Butcher moved out of the grand home that they had constructed collectively on the Precious Moments complicated and into the storage, although he stored it open for guests to tour. They gawked on the stone fountain, the Italian marble flooring, the Czechoslovakian chandeliers and the five-foot-high cloisonné vases lining the hallways. A pair of teak elephants, six ft tall, guarded the entrance door, as did a safety guard.
“After my spouse Katie left,” Mr. Butcher advised The Kansas City Star, “I felt I by no means needed to dwell on this home. I’m only a messy previous artist, so I simply dwell within the storage and paint, and after I’m performed I simply fall asleep.”
In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Butcher is survived by one other son, Don; three daughters, Tammy Bearinger, Deb Butcher and Heather Butcher; and lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mr. Biel and Mr. Butcher parted methods when Mr. Butcher moved to Missouri within the early Nineteen Eighties.
In his prime, Mr. Butcher may knock out three Precious Moments work in a night; his son Jon estimated that he made some 4,000 in his lifetime. “But the chapel was a very completely different animal,” he stated. “Dad was by no means fairly glad. He was always remodeling it” — including characters, tweaking the folds of an angel’s robes, altering the colours of a patch of clouds.
“My work isn’t performed and the chapel won’t ever be performed as a result of I’m at all times impressed to do one thing else,” Mr. Butcher advised The Carthage Press in 2015. “They normally say job effectively performed, however mine is at all times job virtually effectively performed. It’s very, very near being a job effectively performed.”
