Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Treasured Moments collectible figurines ignited a worldwide 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 Might 20 at his house there. He was 85.
His demise was confirmed by his son Jon.
Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his cute snub-nosed Treasured Moments characters have been “the Beanie Infants of porcelain,” as The Wall Road Journal as soon as put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered within the tons of of 1000’s, constructed rooms for his or her Treasured Moments collectible figurines, convened in regional golf equipment and made pilgrimages to Carthage, the place they slept within the Treasured Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled on the Treasured Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined within the Treasured Moments meals courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage additionally hosted Treasured Moments weddings.)
For a time, the Treasured 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 have been tons of and tons of of Treasured Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting playing cards, books and a kids’s Bible. On the firm’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Treasured 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 Treasured 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 individuals simply suppose I’m the gardener,” he mentioned.
Mr. Butcher had been working with a world nondenominational ministry for youngsters, instructing and illustrating Bible tales, when he and a colleague, Invoice Biel, started making inspirational greeting playing cards and posters that includes his winsome characters within the early Seventies. “I got here up with ‘Treasured’ and he got here up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher advised The Kansas Metropolis 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 business 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 One other,” Mr. Butcher later mentioned, he fell to his knees and wept.
In 1978, Enesco launched 21 characters. By 1995, the corporate mentioned, Treasured Moments have 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 mentioned, 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 fuel — and the following morning, as he advised it, God mentioned, “You’re 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 lined 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. However not like Michelangelo, who was identified 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 E-book of Genesis — the half the place God mentioned, “Let there be mild” — Mr. Butcher painted three angels armed with flashlights. For Day 4, when God made the heavens, Mr. Butcher painted an angelic basketball group he referred to as the Capturing Stars.
Different areas of the chapel are extra sober. In Hallelujah Sq., a crowd favourite, dozens of angels are proven coming into heaven, a few of them impressed by the terminally sick kids who had visited the chapel with their mother and father, 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, based on an article in The Baltimore Solar in 1998. “And my cat Midnight ran away.”
Samuel John Butcher was born on New 12 months’s Day, 1939, in Jackson, Mich., considered one of 5 kids of Leon Butcher, who owned a fuel station, and Evelyn (Khoury) Butcher.
Sam grew up in Redding, Calif., and commenced portray when he was 5. Cash was tight and the household finances 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. Inspired by his highschool artwork trainer, he gained a scholarship to the California Faculty 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 little one, 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 prepare dinner in a pancake home.
The couple started attending a neighborhood 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 Treasured Moments advanced 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 toes tall, guarded the entrance door, as did a safety guard.
“After my spouse Katie left,” Mr. Butcher advised The Kansas Metropolis Star, “I felt I by no means needed to stay on this home. I’m only a messy outdated artist, so I simply stay within the storage and paint, and once I’m completed I simply fall asleep.”
Along with his son Jon, Mr. Butcher is survived by one other son, Don; three daughters, Tammy Bearinger, Deb Butcher and Heather Butcher; and plenty of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mr. Biel and Mr. Butcher parted methods when Mr. Butcher moved to Missouri within the early Eighties.
In his prime, Mr. Butcher may knock out three Treasured Moments work in a night; his son Jon estimated that he made some 4,000 in his lifetime. “However the chapel was a totally totally different animal,” he mentioned. “Dad was by no means fairly glad. He was consistently remodeling it” — including characters, tweaking the folds of an angel’s robes, altering the colours of a patch of clouds.
“My work isn’t completed and the chapel won’t ever be completed 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 properly completed, however mine is at all times job virtually properly completed. It’s very, very near being a job properly completed.”
