Buyer sought for Civil War piece

Rare Gettysburg painting worth millions

Wake Forest University wants to sell a massive, 360-degree painting of the Battle of Gettysburg.

All the buyer needs is a few million dollars and a place to keep a 376-foot-long and 22-foot-high work created in 1883.

"We want it going somewhere where it will be taken care of properly and displayed properly," said university spokesman Kevin Cox. "The painting and everything that would be involved is big."

The cyclorama titled "The Battle of Gettysburg" is considered by art experts to be one of the most unusual pieces of American art in history. French military artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux and a team of artists created four of the works depicting one of the key moments in the nation's history: Pickett's Charge, the climax of the battle on July 3, 1863.

Only the one at Wake Forest, the first completed, and one at the Gettysburg National Military Park survive. The park's painting is undergoing a $9 million restoration.

A Gettysburg official has called the cyclorama "the Imax of its day." The paintings give viewers the impression of being in the middle of the fight.

The piece at Wake Forest had been lost for several decades until Joseph Wallace King, the eccentric, late Winston-Salem portrait artist, found it in Chicago. He left it to the university upon his death in 1996 and it has been stored in an undisclosed location on the Wake Forest campus.

The painting was last seen in public in 1933 at the Chicago World's Fair. It disappeared after that and King, who liked large paintings, set out to find it.

"I figured somebody had to do it," King said in a 1984 interview, "or it would be lost forever."

King found the work in 1965 behind the wall of a burned-out warehouse in Chicago."It was just forgotten, really," Cox said. "It was probably a miracle that anyone found it."

King never revealed how much he paid for the painting. Appraisers have valued it at $2.2 million to $3.2 million, even though the cyclorama requires an expensive restoration. The buyer also would need a specially designed building to display the work.

Still, Wake Forest officials remain hopeful of finding a new owner.

"There may be someone or something -- and we believe there is -- who will eventually be the appropriate buyer for this," Cox said. "It's going to take someone with imagination and some vision."