Over 35 years ago I was up in northern Alabama in an old store called J&J Junk. And that is literally what it was. It was an old building that was a junk store burrowed on the side of a mountain where my aunt and uncle lived with my Grandma Brannan.
I had just had Joshua and was expecting Jonathan. We were visiting for Thanksgiving. As my mother and I dug around I came across a print of a small baby boy sound asleep snuggled into a soft pillow. The picture looked remarkably like Joshua, and due to severe colic, the only time Joshua looked that precious was when he was sleeping.
I purchased the print for $2 to hang in the living room of our tiny old house that was new to us, having not been married very long. The artist's name was signed at the bottom: Bessie Pease Gutmann. And the title of the print was A Little Piece of Heaven. Our Joshua, even in his moments of terrible colic, certainly was that to us.
Some years later I was back home browsing in an antique store. By then we had four small boys. I came across a similar print framed that was priced at over $100. It was the same artist. I could not wait to tell my husband what a great deal I had purchased up on that mountain at J&J junk. I asked if I could purchase the other one, and he said no, but I could sell the original one if that is the price I could fetch. Needless to say, the picture still hangs in our home.
By this time, I was writing my column for this paper. And I decided to do some research on this artist. It was still in the 1990’s. Search engines were archaic and not much more useful than the old encyclopedias gathering dust on living room shelves. I found a small bit of information on Mrs. Gutmann but no mention of children so I assumed she did not have any and perhaps that is why she was known for her artistic prints of small children. In my mind I had created my own story of this fine lady's past.
Cut to: Thirty-seven years later. The other day I was shopping in my favorite thrift store when I came across yet another one of these prints. And once again the baby looked like Joshua as a baby. Her work is easy to detect. This one was titled Awakening. It was a small infant looking much like the one in the first print, looking up after a nap. The back of the frame had tiny nails holding the print in place indicating that the print was an old one and not a newer print, being that her work was rediscovered after the 2nd World War and then again in the late 1900's for greeting cards.
With Joshua expecting a little girl at the end of this month I was tickled to make this find for a huge sum of $10. And now, close to 40 years later, the two prints hang in my breakfast room together. Out of curiosity I looked this lady up once again and found a ton of information on her. Her husband owned the Gutmann printing company she worked for before marrying and becoming a Gutmann. She also had indeed given birth to three children who were the models for her early prints. So, not only did she and I have the same love of children, our children must have looked alike as babies as well.
She lived an extremely happy and productive life, I discovered when reading about her and her years as a mother and an artist. She was born in 1876 and lived to be 84 years old. She had a 50-year career and published over 600 works. And over 150 years later her work is celebrated in our home. Thank goodness for writers, everyone and everything has a story!
