Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose fawn-eyed, pastel-hued Precious Moments porcelain figurines ignited a global collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man, and whose Christian faith prompted him to build his own version of the Chapel Sistine in Carthage, Missouri, died May 20 at her home there. He was 85 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son Jon.
Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his adorable, snub-nosed Precious Moments characters were “the porcelain Beanie Babies,” as The Wall Street Journal once put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, built rooms for their Precious Moments figures, gathered in regional clubs and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they slept at the Precious Moments motel or trailer park, marveled at the Precious Moments Fountain of Los Angeles, dined at the Precious Moments food courts and strolled the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)
For a time, Precious Moments Care-a-Van, an 18-wheeler outfitted as a museum, filled with figures and dioramas telling Mr. Butcher’s life story, toured the country. There were hundreds and hundreds of Precious Moments licensees, making hats, keychains, watches, greeting cards, books, and a children’s Bible. At the company’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ global retail sales reached more than $500 million each year, a staggering amount for a man who was once so poor he struggled to buy food for his seven children. of the.
Butcher, whose fans sought him out at the Precious Moments venue to autograph their figurines and posters (he always carried two pens to do so), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a wrinkled figure typically dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. , with paint in her thick hair and a shy smile.
“Most people just think I’m the gardener,” he said.
Butcher had been working with an international nondenominational children’s ministry, teaching and illustrating Bible stories, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, began making inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring their engaging characters in the early 1970s. I came up with ‘Precious’ and he came up with ‘Moments,’” Butcher told the Kansas City Star in 1995.
At a trade show the two men attended, Eugene Freedman, president of the Enesco Group, an Illinois-based gift-goods company, saw the waifs they had created and thought they had commercial potential as figurines (competitors, perhaps, those made by the company). Hummel, the veteran giant of collectibles. When Yasuhei Fujioka, the Japanese sculptor Freedman commissioned to translate Butcher’s characters into porcelain, made the first figure, a boy and girl huddled on a tree stump with the title “Love One Another,” Butcher later said : fell to his knees and cried.
In 1978, Enesco introduced 21 characters. In 1995, the company said, Precious Moments were the world’s No. 1 collectible.
In 1984, Mr. Butcher was living in Michigan and traveling to his factories in Asia when, he said, God told him to build a chapel. Driving home from a business trip to Arizona, he took a detour to look for a place. He stopped in Carthage to spend the night (he was hungry, tired and needed gas) and the next morning, as he told it, God told him: “You are here.”
He purchased 17½ acres, which he would expand over the years. He had been to Rome and seen the Sistine Chapel, and that was his inspiration for the 9,000-square-foot sanctuary he built, which he covered with 84 murals, along with bronze panels and stained glass. It took four years to build; Mr. Butcher often worked, as Michelangelo had, on his back, suspended from scaffolding, painting the Bible stories from creation to resurrection. But unlike Michelangelo, known for his muscular figures, Butcher populated his chapel with his characteristic goblins. And he allowed himself some creative leeway.
For his depiction of the first day of creation from the Book of Genesis (the part where God said, “Let there be light”), Butcher painted three angels armed with lanterns. For the fourth day, when God made the heavens, Mr. Butcher painted an angelic basketball team that he called Shooting Stars.
Other areas of the chapel are more sober. In Hallelujah Square, a crowd favorite, dozens of angels are shown entering heaven, some of them inspired by the terminally ill children who had visited the chapel with their parents, and whose images Mr. Butcher later painted of his death. He built a room which he dedicated to his son Philip, who died in 1990, and a tower for his son Tim, who died in 2012. A scrapbook in the chapel is filled with the names of visitors’ loved ones, along with prayers. and notes: “My grandfather and my aunt died,” wrote a young woman named Jenni, according to a Baltimore Sun article in 1998. “And my cat Midnight ran away.”
Samuel John Butcher was born on New Year’s Day 1939 in Jackson, Michigan, one of five children of Leon Butcher, a gas station owner, and Evelyn (Khoury) Butcher.
Sam grew up in Redding, California, and began painting when he was 5 years old. Money was tight and the family budget didn’t stretch to art supplies, so he used rolls of paper salvaged from the local landfill and leftover car paint from his father’s business. . Encouraged by his high school art teacher, he won a scholarship to the California College of the Arts, then based in Oakland.
He married Katie Cushman, a high school friend, in 1959; His father sold a cow to pay for the wedding. When he had his first child, Jon, in 1962, Sam dropped out of college and worked, variously, as a janitor; in a wallpaper store, where he made window displays; and as a cook in a creperie.
The couple began attending a local Baptist church and one Sunday, Mr. Butcher left with a hymnal by mistake. The guilt he felt triggered something in him; By the following Sunday, he was already a convert.
They divorced in 1987 (but remained close) and Mr. Butcher moved from the large house they had built together in the Precious Moments complex into the garage, although he kept it open so visitors could tour it. They gaped at the stone fountain, Italian marble floors, Czechoslovakian chandeliers and five-foot-tall cloisonné vases that lined the hallways. A pair of teak elephants, two meters tall, guarded the front door, as did a security guard.
“After my wife Katie left,” Butcher told the Kansas City Star, “I felt like I never wanted to live in this house. I’m just a messy old artist, so I live in the garage and paint, and when I’m done I go to sleep.”
In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Butcher is survived by another son, Don; three daughters, Tammy Bearinger, Deb Butcher and Heather Butcher; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Biel and Butcher separated when Butcher moved to Missouri in the early 1980s.
In his prime, Mr. Butcher could paint three Precious Moments paintings in one night; His son Jon estimated that he earned about 4,000 over his lifetime. “But the chapel was a completely different animal,” he said. “Dad was never completely satisfied. “He was constantly reworking it”: adding characters, modifying the folds of an angel’s robe, changing the colors of an area of clouds.
“My work is never done and the chapel will never be finished because I am always inspired to do something else,” Butcher told The Carthage Press in 2015. “They usually say job well done, but mine is always job almost well done.” made. “It is very, very close to being a job well done.”