Where is Fredericksburg painting stolen in 1862?

War-time sketch by Arthur Lumley shows Union soldiers looting  Fredericksburg on Dec. 12, 1862.  (Library of Congress collection)

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In mid-December 1862, Fredericksburg, Va., burned — both from U.S. artillery and the chaos that followed. After bombarding the town, Federal soldiers ransacked homes, carrying off silverware, rare books, clothing… and The Saviour at the Garden of Gethsemane, a beautiful oil painting gifted to Juliet Neale by a French nobleman. Thomas Burke, a 16th Connecticut veteran and skilled frame-maker, may have taken part in the plunder and later added the stolen artwork to his collection.

Wartime image of Thomas Burke

Twenty years after the Civil War, Burke — described in his obituary as a man of "warm heart and unquestioned courage" — died of pneumonia at age 50. Financial hardship shadowed his final years, but he had lived a life shaped — and haunted — by the war and tragedy.

"He had not the business turn that would give him success," the Hartford Courant reported April 18, 1885, in a front-page obituary, "and he saw hard days which he took quietly and without complaint." Burke, a widower who had lost his wife in a boarding house fire 13 years earlier, was buried with military honors.

Before enlisting in 1862, Burke had decorated his Hartford home with art “that another man would have sold easily and at high prices,” the Courant noted, “but very often remained with him some time and then went back to their former owners.” 

Meanwhile, Fredericksburg’s citizens endured wartime devastation. Neale, a wealthy 62-year-old divorcee, saw her home transformed into a Federal hospital. The building at 307 Caroline Street still stands, a silent witness to looting, loss and the chaos of war. (See it here on Google Street View.)

But the fate of her purloined painting remains a mystery. Where is The Saviour at the Garden of Gethsemane today?

Juliet Neale, whose painting was "obtained" by 16th Connecticut Captain Thomas Burke.
(Courtesy of Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center)

PRESENT-DAY: 307 Caroline Street, where Juliet Neale lived in 1862.
(Google Street View)

Hardship and derring-do defined Thomas Burke’s wartime service. On Sept. 17, 1862, he survived the bloodbath at Antietam — his regiment’s first battle — without a scratch. At Fredericksburg, the 16th Connecticut was held in reserve and saw little action. But on April 20, 1864, he was captured with most of his regiment at Plymouth, N.C., and spent six months in Confederate prisons in Macon, Ga., as well as Columbia and Charleston, S.C.

Thomas Burke (right) in a war-time image.
(Photo: BZC)

Burke’s ordeal included two daring escapes. Packed into a train en route from Columbia to Charleston, he and two other 16th Connecticut officers leaped from the open boxcars. Six days later, a hunter found them asleep in the woods, his dogs standing guard while he went for help.

Returned to a POW stockade in Columbia, Burke and the same two officers escaped again on Nov. 3, 1864, “with only rags to cover them, and nothing for their journey.” An 1872 account recalled:

"The night was dreary and rainy and the roads were very muddy, but, emaciated as they were by over six months confinement and exhausted with the labors of the day and with anxiety, they resolutely pushed on all night and the next day, carefully avoiding the habitations of men, and finding their subsistence in the fields they passed through."

The fugitives joined other escapees and undertook a perilous journey down a South Carolina river in two small boats supplied by local enslaved people. With a meager supply of sweet potatoes, turnips and cornbread — and “the benediction of the faithful negroes” — the eight former POWs traveled for nine days through dangerous backcountry to reach the Atlantic.

Three of the soldiers, including 16th Connecticut captains Timothy Robinson and Alfred Dickerson, rowed their leaky boat miles into the open sea to reach the Union blockader Canandaigua, stunning its crew:

“To the officers and men it seemed as if the thunder of their own guns must have startled these fugitives from the caverns of the deep, so incredibly daring was the voyage upon the foaming sea with a boat so leaky and so frail, as hardly to withstand a zephyr, and orders were at once given to take it aboard and keep it as a token of what men would dare to do.”

The remaining five men were rescued shortly thereafter. Their rescuers provided new uniforms — the soldiers' “tattered, vermin rags were thrown into the sea” — and furloughs to visit home. It may have been during this furlough that Burke laid eyes again on his ill-gotten prize: the painting from Neale’s house. How the artwork eventually made its way to Connecticut remains a mystery.

A 16th-century version of "The Saviour at the Garden of Gethsemane." The appearance 
of  Juliet Neale's version of this painting is unknown.

Burke had the painting in his possession until 1880, when he either sold it or gave it to Charles H. Owen, a Hartford man who had served as a major in the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery.

Perhaps troubled by a guilty conscience, Owen decided early in the 20th century to return the stolen  painting to its rightful owner. On Nov. 26, 1901, the Hartford Courant ran a front-page story under the headline “Relic of the War”:

“Correspondence with Fredericksburg has revealed that the painting was taken from the home of Mrs. Juliet A. Neale, who had bequeathed the house and its contents to her niece, Mrs. H. Mcd. Martin, who is living. Mrs. Martin remembers the picture well as it hung in the house of her aunt.”

The newspaper noted that the painting had been “obtained” by Burke in Fredericksburg during the war and that “for a time [the painting] was mislaid and recently it was recovered.”

On Nov. 26, 1901, the Hartford Courant
reported about the discovery of a
painting "obtained" by a
Connecticut officer in Fredericksburg
 in 1862.

The story quickly spread. A day later, the Richmond (Va.) Dispatch described the painting as “valuable” and a “beautiful picture.” Days after that, The Saviour at the Garden of Gethsemane — albeit damaged — was finally returned to Neale’s heir more than 39 years after it had been stolen.

“Before it came into my hands it had been cut from the frame, rolled tight and cracked,” Owen wrote in a letter to Neale’s niece. “It has been oiled several times to preserve it, but experts say it can never be restored to its original appearance.”

But the story does not end there. Juliet Neale’s painting is once again missing. While her historically minded descendants in Fredericksburg are aware of the 1901 media coverage, the artwork’s current whereabouts are unknown.

Could it be in a Virginia museum, perhaps somewhere in Fredericksburg? Donated to a historical society? Rolled up, crumbling and forgotten, in an attic or basement? Or sold at a flea market to a buyer unaware of its rich history?

Perhaps readers can provide clues.

And what would Thomas Burke, the man who set this story in motion, think of it all? His long-ago obituary in the Hartford Courant may offer a hint:

“He would pinch himself to help a stranger and never would think twice of it. He will be singularly regretted by those who knew him well enough to understand the real man that lay somewhat hidden under a rather misleading exterior.”

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SOURCES AND NOTES

• Baltimore Sun, Nov. 27, 1901
• Confederate Veteran, Vol.25, 1917, Page 534
• Connecticut War Record, December 1864
• Bristol (Conn.) Press, June 7, 1872
•  Fredericksburg Remembered -- Musings on history, public history, and historic Fredericksburg, "The Women of Fredericksburg Mobilize," Oct. 3, 2010 (blog accessed Dec. 17, 2016.)
• Hartford Courant, Jan. 19, 1872, April 18, 1885, April 20, 1885, Nov. 26, 1901
• Richmond Dispatch, Nov. 27, 1901
• The Free Lance, Fredericksburg, Va., Nov. 30, 1901
• 1860 U.S. census