Sam Butcher sometimes struggled to elucidate why Precious Moments figurines, his signature artistic creation, became such a cultural phenomenon. Half one million people joined special collectors’ clubs to get them. The manufacturer released 25 to 40 recent ones every yr. And Butcher, an art school dropout, earned tens of tens of millions of dollars in annual royalties.
“I’m still … attempting to determine what it’s all about,” he once said. “I’m just an artist. I just license my art.”
But in the event you asked the men and women who bought the porcelain statuettes—rosy-cheeked children with teardrop-shaped eyes that filled mantels, shelves, tables, and curio cabinets—they might tell definitely you.
“They’re cute,” an Illinois woman explained to the Chicago Tribune. “And they’ve an inspirational title that has lots of on a regular basis meaning.”
A person in East Tennessee who collected greater than 200 along with his wife said he found the figurines irresistible. He at all times had to choose them as much as read the titles on the underside. One was called “God Loveth a Cheerful Giver,” and it was just a little girl with a wagon stuffed with puppies to offer away. Another said “I Will Make You Fishers of Men,” and it was a boy with a pole and line, hook snagged within the waist of his smaller friend’s pants.
“I actually just like the little sayings,” the retired postal employee told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
A lady at a collectors’ club at a Lutheran church in Moline, Iowa, said the figurines were just “silly things” that nevertheless “grow on you,” but her friend, who began collecting Precious Moments pieces after she got her first as an anniversary gift in 1979, said she felt they were greater than that.
Each had a special meaning. Each connected to something that she treasured.
A figurine could memorialize an occasion or mark the importance of a relationship.
A collector who had shelves specially built for her Precious Moments figurines in her home in Alabama told the Montgomery Advertiser that she bought one for every of her three daughters. Another topped the cake for her and her husband’s twenty fifth anniversary.
The figurines could by some means capture the best way people felt in regards to the very biggest things of their lives.
“From motherhood and family to friendship and encouragement to like and marriage to birthdays and graduation,” said a girl in Olathe, Kansas, “there may be a Precious Moments figurine to provide help to express your emotions.”
A teenage collector with cancer bought hers as she went through treatment. She said they simply made her feel higher. A lady in Ohio said she got attached to every one individually, because “it seems like falling in love every time you purchase one other figurine.”
A collector in Hanover, Pennsylvania, got her first on her honeymoon. She collected one other 136 in the following six years, and displayed all of them in her front room.
“When you take a look at them,” she told her local newspaper in 1987, “they are only so precious! There’s no other word.”
Sam Butcher, the artist behind all of that, died on May 20. He was 85.
“He was an artist of affection, a messenger of the divine, a shepherd of miracles,” the family-written obituary said. “He taught us that the most effective mode of transportation through life is commonly a leap of religion, and that after you leap and before you land, is God.”
Butcher was born on January 1, 1939, in Jackson, Michigan, to Evelyn and Leon Butcher. His mother’s family was from Lebanon. His father was an auto mechanic. Most of the family was mechanically inclined, but young Sam liked to attract, according to a Precious Moments company history. The family moved to Redding, California, when he was a boy, and he loved drawing a lot he would salvage rolls of paper from a factory dump near his home.
His artistic talents were encouraged by a teacher named Rex Moravec and his mother, who pushed him to go to art school. Butcher got a scholarship to California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, but dropped out in 1962 when his wife got pregnant and so they couldn’t afford a physician.
They had a second child the yr after that, after which five more. Butcher got a job as a janitor, dishwasher, and short-order cook at a restaurant he remembered to the tip of his life with revulsion.
At that point, Butcher’s life took a spiritual turn. His wife, Katie, wanted to boost their kids in a church, so that they attended a Baptist service near their home. The first Sunday, Butcher by chance stole a hymnal. The second Sunday, he returned it, had a conversation with the minister, a person named Royal Blue, and committed his life to Christ.
The minister also helped Butcher find work that may feel more meaningful. The young artist got a job on the international offices of Child Evangelism Fellowship and moved his growing family back to his home state of Michigan.
Butcher began in shipping but soon got himself promoted to the art department. He did illustrations and comic strips and worked on a kids TV show, where he got the nickname “Quick Draw Sam.”
Butcher left in 1974, partnering along with his friend Bill Biel to start out a greeting card company they called Jonathan & David. Butcher began developing the trademark style—cherubic kids with soulful eyes in nostalgic and mawkish scenes—and quickly saw there was a hungry market. At a convention in Anaheim, California, Christian bookstore owners ordered so many cards that Butcher and Biel needed to get help from vendors at neighboring booths to put in writing down all of the orders.
Eugene Freedman definitely saw their potential. The CEO of a giftware company called Enesco Imports, he saw Butcher’s drawings at a convention in 1978 and knew he desired to turn them into porcelain figurines.
Butcher was initially resistant but allowed Freedman to work with a Japanese sculptor to supply a prototype. The first figurine was two kids sitting back to back on a stump, called “Love One Another.” When Butcher saw it, he later recalled, he got on his knees, took it in his arms, and cried.
They had a deal. Working with the sculptor, Yasuhei Fujioka, Enesco and Jonathan & David turned 21 of Butcher’s drawings into figurines, manufactured the little statuettes, imported them to the US, and began selling them.
They expected to achieve success. But they were shocked at just how successful.
“It was really strange to me firstly,” Bob Feller, who became director of Enesco’s Precious Moments division, later said. “We had a present line that changed into a phenomenon. People got so involved. We couldn’t consider it.”
In 1980, they launched Precious Moments collectors’ clubs, offering members limited edition figurines in the event that they paid a membership fee, plus the prospect to satisfy with sales reps, hear about forthcoming figurines, and connect with like-minded collectors of their areas. In the primary six months, 300,000 people joined.
By 1995, there have been greater than 500,000 Precious Moments club members within the United States and greater than 30,000 shops selling the figurines at prices starting from $25 to $300. The following yr, Enesco made greater than $200 million on Precious Moments products, according to The Wall Street Journal. Butcher got greater than $50 million in royalties, with a guaranteed annual minimum of $15 million.
With his sudden success—and sudden wealth—Butcher decided he was going to construct a chapel. He was inspired by a visit to Italy, where he saw Michelangelo’s art on the Sistine Chapel.
Butcher desired to be, he said, “an artist within the service of the Lord.”
He didn’t know where he should construct it. So, when he got back to the US, he asked God to guide him and went on an impromptu cross-country road trip. Late at night on a highway about 200 miles east of Oklahoma City, with nearly 300 miles still to go to St. Louis, Butcher had a sense.
“Something very holy was within the automotive,” he said. “I used to be so affected that I drove off and parked along side the road. I just remember it was very, very quiet and amazing.”
The next day, he learned he was in Carthage, Missouri, found an actual estate agent, and purchased 17 acres of property. He built a church and began to color it: 84 murals, covering 5,000 square feet, all with biblical themes done within the Precious Moments style.
He designed 30 stained glass windows. The 15 on the east side depicted Psalm 23. The 15 on the west, the Beatitudes. He ordered marble for the floors from Italy, crystal chandeliers from Czechoslovakia.
The most ambitious part was probably the ceiling. It was 1,400 square feet, 30 feet off the bottom. He spent about 500 hours on his back on a scaffold, painting Precious Moments angels and puffy clouds.
It was “very difficult,” Butcher told the Kansas City Star. “Very, very difficult.”
He felt a deep discouragement come over him, but, as he later told one in every of his sons, God gave him the strength to proceed.
Newspapers in the world began to consult with him as “the Michelangelo of Missouri.” Where Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment within the Sistine Chapel, Butcher put a number entering paradise. One looked like his father driving a pink convertible, one other like his teacher Rex. There were children he’d known and soldiers who’d died and a lot of angels, and all of them had the teardrop-shaped eyes that so many found so moving.
“I believe he needed to be inspired by God to color all this,” a visitor from Coweta, Oklahoma, told one reporter.
At the identical time, Butcher’s personal life got very hard. Before he could finish a house for his family to live in in Carthage, his marriage led to divorce. Butcher decided he wouldn’t move into the home by himself, so he stayed within the garage, where he painted until he fell asleep.
Then, the yr after the chapel opened, one in every of his eldest sons died in a automotive accident.
“I actually, really was shook,” Butcher later said. “I didn’t know learn how to handle the situation. I continued to ask the Lord to offer me a solution, to inform me why this had happened.”
He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His children took over the day-to-day operation of Precious Moments. Attacks of depression grew more frequent.
After a second son died in 2012, one lasted around a yr.
“I had anxiety, hatred, bitterness, fear. All that filled the room in my heart,” he told The Joplin Globe. “I couldn’t see the Lord anymore.”
One day, while lying in a hospital bed, nevertheless, he felt an incredible sense of calm come over him. He couldn’t see God. But God could see him. The Lord, he said, reminded him of the time that he got here into his life, back at that Baptist church in Northern California, and he felt higher.
Butcher began painting again after that. But he turned to a recent style, painting works of recent art. He experimented with cubism and primitivism, inspired by Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin. There were no teardrop-shaped eyes in the brand new paintings. Nothing sentimental. Instead, thick-bodied men and girls wearing few clothes danced, played, and slept in fields of flowers.
Butcher got so absorbed within the painting, he said, he would sometimes forget to eat and even button up his shirt.
“I’m only a messy old artist,” Butcher said. “I just really desired to serve the Lord.”
As he was dying, Butcher told his family he was with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and it was beautiful.
He was preceded in death by his ex-wife, Katie, and their two sons, Phillip and Timothy. Butcher is survived by his children Jon, Tammy, Debbie, Don, and Heather.
