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Bessie Pease Gutmann
Bucilla Needle Crafts
 Perhaps
best known for her heartwarming art prints featuring innocent
children during the early part of the twentieth century, Bessie
Pease Gutmann achieved worldwide fame. Through licensing,
Gutmann, who was born in 1876, is still greatly admired today
by collectors everywhere.
Beginning with book and magazine illustrations,
Gutmann's art received its widest circulation in the artist's
day through fine art prints. These hand-colored prints graced
homes throughout America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Gutmann's
heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s, but the cruelties of World
War II brought an age of innocence quickly to an end, and
a decline to Gutmann's popularity. A shortage of good quality
paper and adequate labor during the war also hindered production.
By 1947, Gutmann decided to stop producing art, after almost
fifty years and over six hundred art prints to her credit,
because of failing eyesight. 
While Gutmann died on September 29, 1960 in Centerport, New
York her prints remain among the all-time best sellers. Her
winning art prints of endearing children are still as admired
as ever and, with the recent formation of a national organization
to promote her art, should be for a long time to come.
It is the designs from those wonderful art prints that have
been so beautifully translated into Bucilla's line of Bessie
Pease Gutmann counted-cross stitch, allowing new generations
to fall in love with the artist's work all over again.
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