Errant portrait finds a home in N.C. museum

RALEIGH -- ******

CORRECTION

A front-page article Saturday about a John Singleton Copley painting incorrectly said North Carolina was a colony in 1783. North Carolina adopted its first state constitution in 1776 and achieved statehood in 1789.

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The man in the painting is self-assured. Dressed in sober business attire, he has a quill pen at the ready and a ledger book beneath his elbow.

The portrait of John Burgwin, painted by John Singleton Copley in the 18th century, was hung this week at the N.C. Museum of Art as something of a homecoming. It slipped out of the state's hands more than three decades ago and had been all but forgotten.

And with the painting has come a mystery, carefully brushed into Burgwin's stately pose.

"No work of art is ever what it seems, at least at first glance," said John Coffey, the museum's deputy art director. "All good pictures are haunted."

Burgwin was an Englishman who settled in Wilmington and built a mercantile and shipping business, and he later married into substantial plantation holdings. He held several high political positions with the first governors of colonial North Carolina.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, he spent much of it in London, loyal to the king, perhaps, conflicted about his allegiances or unsure how the hostilities would play out.

He returned after the war, reclaimed his property and brought back a portrait commissioned from Copley, America's first great artist. Copley had left Boston in 1775 to advance his career in London and often painted visiting Americans.

This painting, apparently done in 1783, was one of Copley's few portraits of Southerners.

The Burgwin family did well in North Carolina (his son changed the spelling of the family name to Burgwyn, perhaps to embrace their Welsh roots). From the fifth generation, W.H.S. Burgwyn II was a judge, state senator, University of North Carolina trustee and solicitor before his death in 1977.

In 1916, the judge loaned the painting to the state history museum, known then as the Hall of History, in Raleigh. Some surviving relatives remember seeing it there when they were children and recall that it was always a proud part of the family's history. It remained there for decades, and in a bit of foreshadowing it made an appearance at the art museum for the state's 300th anniversary celebration in 1963.

Then Judge Burgwyn abruptly took the painting back. It had been there so long that the museum staff thought it belonged to the state.

Margaret Cooley, 86, of Woodland, the judge's daughter and only living child, says her recollection is that her father got mad when he found the painting in storage in the museum's basement. Don Pratt of Asheville, who married a Burgwyn cousin, says a representative of a New York City gallery had spotted the painting in the history museum.

"Of course we were disappointed they wanted to withdraw it," H.G. Jones, retired state archives and history director, said Friday. "But we understood because at that time it appeared to be worth a great deal of money."

The gallery told the family the painting might fetch as much as $1 million, Pratt said, and offered to restore it and split the profit if it could sell it. Burgwyn transferred ownership to his four children and in 1969 sent the painting to New York.

"It shocked me," Cooley said Friday.

The task of keeping track of the painting eventually fell to Pratt and his wife, as they lived in nearby Connecticut. For whatever reason -- maybe the asking price was too high, maybe portraits of unknown men weren't desirable -- the portrait never sold.