Ben Austrian and the Bon Ami Chick

If you have ever seen the Bon Ami cleanser logo, a small fluffy chick hatching from an egg with the words "hasn't scratched yet," you have seen the best-known work of Ben Austrian, according to the state marker. He was born in Reading in eighteen seventy and taught himself to paint. Austrian won international recognition for his barnyard scenes, woodland creatures, still lifes, and landscapes.

But the image that outlasted everything else was that little chick, which became one of the most recognized commercial images in early twentieth-century America. Austrian spent his most contented years at his estate called Clovelly at the Pinnacle, near here in the hills of Berks County, and died there in nineteen twenty-one at the age of fifty-one. He is buried nearby.

The chick still hatches on the label today.