The Bluegrass and Beyond

Today I have updates on two previous columns, plus a tip on how you can help a new neighbor while scoring a cheap set of wheels.

You may remember the story of Gordon Burnette of Lexington, a tool-and-die maker and amateur art sleuth.

After a neighbor died and her house was sold, Burnette noticed several old, beat-up paintings on the curb. One showing a mare and foal caught his eye. Written on the back was the mare’s name, the artist’s name and June 1882.

Gordon Burnette and Genevieve Baird Lacer with the Thomas J. Scott painting Burnette found on the curb. Photo by Tom Eblen

Impressed by the painting’s quality, Burnette had it restored. Then he began a quest to learn more about the mysterious Thomas J. Scott, one of the top equine artists of the 19th century. He also created a Web site (www.thomasjscott.com) in hopes of identifying other Scott paintings, many of which have been lost over time.

Since the column appeared in May, the Headley-Whitney Museum has agreed to host an exhibit next year of paintings by Scott and his more-famous teacher, Edward Troye. And Burnette has heard from several people with Scott paintings who had no idea what they had.

A Louisville woman bought one at an auction, where it was propping open the door.

The strangest call came from a Lexington woman with a painting almost identical to Burnette’s, only smaller.

“She was so thrilled because she had had this painting all these years and didn’t know who the horses were, who the artist was or where it came from,” Burnette said. He thinks it was the study for his painting, or a copy made for a subsequent owner of the horse.

Where had the painting been hanging all these years? About three blocks away.

Money for Tanzania

Like Burnette, Flaget Nally had no intention of embarking on a quest. But that’s what happened as she was ending a three-year stint as a Catholic lay missionary in Tanzania.

Flaget Nally

A group of nuns asked Nally to raise money for them to build an English-language boarding school for as many as 800 girls of all faiths in a part of Tanzania where girls rarely have a chance to be educated. The Bardstown native had no idea how to do that — or even if she could.

Nally formed Giant Steps for African Girls (www.educateafricangirls.org), which held a fund-raising walk in Lexington last April and other events around Kentucky. So far, it has raised more than $104,000. About $50,000 of that has come from the Lexington area.

A cheap set of wheels?

While writing about Bike Lexington in May, I mentioned Shifting Gears, a partnership between Pedal Power bicycle shop and Kentucky Refugee Ministries, a multi-denomination Christian group that works with the U.S. State Department to resettle legal refugees.

Shifting Gears takes good-quality bikes, which are either donated or taken in trade by Pedal Power, and fixes them up to give to refugees, many of whom have no other transportation. Shop employees and volunteers fix bikes; others are sold to raise money for parts.

The goal is 52 bikes a year. “We’ve been able to beat that every year,” said Brad Flowers, a partner in Bullhorn Marketing who started Shifting Gears in 2003 while working at Pedal Power.

Last year, more than 80 bikes were given away. In addition to adult bikes for refugees, children’s bikes are given to The Nest, a non-profit social service agency off North Limestone.

Pedal Power owner Billy Yates said community response has been so strong that he has far more donated bikes than Shifting Gears can fix. They’ve filled his shop’s attic, and some have to go.

Beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday, Yates will be selling about 200 of the bikes for between $25 and $75 in the parking lot of his shop at Maxwell and Upper streets. There also will be bike parts for as little as a dollar each. All proceeds go to Shifting Gears and Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

“This sale will raise money to allow us to continue fixing up some bikes and give us some space to get more organized and efficient,” Yates said.

After one of his Courtney Avenue neighbors died and her house was sold, Gordon Burnette noticed several old paintings left by the curb with some other junk.

One in particular caught his eye: a picture of a mare and foal. Written on the back was the mare’s name, the artist’s name and June 1882.

The painting was in bad shape, though, so Burnette left it on the curb.

Later, his son saw the paintings and brought them home. “He said, ‘You like horses. You can have this one,’” Burnette recalled.

A little Internet research told Burnette that the mare, Miss Russell, was a great trotting broodmare whose 1898 death was reported in The New York Times.

The artist, too, was special. Thomas J. Scott was one of the most prolific equine portrait artists of the late 19th century. Beyond that, though, little is known about him. And aside from a few prized paintings, the fate of most of his work is a mystery.

Scott and his paintings have become an obsession for Burnette, a tool-and-die maker who over the past six years has become an amateur equine art sleuth.

Since January, he has been working with author Genevieve Baird Lacer to research Scott and track down his largely forgotten work.

While Scott painted more than 150 horse portraits, Burnette has been able to find only about 30 of them. Perhaps the most important one is a large portrait of the great Thoroughbred stud Lexington, which hangs in the clubhouse at Keeneland.

Another, of Lexington’s dam, Alice Carneal, is in the Georgetown and Scott County Museum. Others hang locally at Waveland Museum and Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate. And there are some in the Jockey Club of New York and the National Museum of Racing at Saratoga, N.Y.

Most of Scott’s other known paintings are privately owned. Burnette and Lacer suspect there are dozens more out there — many of them in Central Kentucky — decorating the walls of families who have no idea what they have.

Burnette has had his painting of Miss Russell professionally restored, and he recently bought another Scott on eBay — an 1874 portrait of the stallion Acrobat. Burnette isn’t so much interested in collecting as in documenting Scott and his work — and in bringing Scott the fame he thinks he deserves.

Eventually, Lacer and Burnette hope to gather enough information and images to publish a book about Scott. They also dream of putting together an exhibit of his work during the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

Lacer became interested in Scott because he was one of only two known students of the great equine portrait artist Edward Troye, whom she profiled in a 2006 book.

“Engravings of Scott’s paintings appeared in all of the leading horse publications,” Lacer said. “That’s how we know he was so important at the time. But later, he was forgotten. We don’t know why.”

Scott was born in Pennsylvania in 1830 and graduated from the Philadelphia School of Pharmacy in 1846. Apparently, his artistic talent and passion for horses led him to Lexington in the 1850s, where he studied with Troye and painted some of the greatest Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds of the age.

Because photography was then in its infancy, Lacer said, “We wouldn’t know what these great foundation horses looked like if these men hadn’t painted them.”

When the Civil War began, Scott joined the 21st Regiment Kentucky Volunteers (Union) and served under the artist Samuel W. Price as the unit’s hospital steward. After the war, Scott lived and painted in the Northeast for several years before returning to Kentucky.

Newspapers and horse publications of the day have frequent mentions of Scott and what he was painting at the time, but little other information about him.

Scott probably didn’t earn much as a painter, so he might also have worked as a pharmacist. He was a journalist for one of the leading horse publications, Turf, Field and Farm. He wrote under the pseudonym “Prog,” which means to wander and beg for food. He died in 1888 at St. Joseph Hospital and is buried in Lexington Cemetery.

If you think you might have a painting by Thomas J. Scott, you can contact Burnette and Lacer at g.burnette@insightbb.com. They have created a Web site, www.thomasjscott.com.

“These paintings have been revered by families so much that many of them remain in private collections to this day,” Lacer said. “If you have a horse portrait that looks old and you don’t know the origin of it, we might be able to help you identify it.”

Click on each image to enlarge it.