As a child, Thomas Burger learned to paint and draw from his step-grandfather, Alex Wierchowski, during summer days in South Bend, Indiana.

“My grandfather was a very good artist,” says Burger, who grew up in Michigan but spent summers in Indiana and later attended college there. “He painted icons and restored religious objects. He’d take ugly junk and make it beautiful again. At a thrift store, he found a beautiful bronze tabletop sculpture of a nude that he kept in his studio.

“He could paint things from memory,” says Burger, who gives an emotional account of his German-born grandfather’s surviving the Holocaust. “He taught me to draw mountains and tulips; they were easy to create, and he loved the flowers and mountains in Germany. He is the reason I went into art restoration and conservation.”

Inspired by his grandfather, who died when Burger was ten, he studied fine art and art history at Indiana University’s South Bend campus.  After graduating in 2003, he moved to New Orleans. “I felt a strong connection with its people, food, art, antiques, and architecture,” says Burger of his adopted city. 

After a month-long internship with the New Orleans Conservation Guild, studying under Blake Vonder Haar, Burger was taken on as an apprentice, spending nearly a year doing supervised restoration and conservation of paintings, decorative objects, and works on paper.

He then worked for the Ritz Carlton Hotel, restoring art, and doing room restoration.  “I was on the care team,” he says. “I did room care, repainting rooms and repairing furniture.”

When Katrina hit in August 2005, he was suddenly without a job. “I took the opportunity to get back to art restoration,” says Burger, who spent months in New Orleans helping repair hurricane damage before relocating to Plaquemine in February 2006. “I did not want to have to evacuate again,” he says of the move. “I wanted a safe haven.”

He found it in a Victorian shotgun house, circa 1890, on Eden Street, which he purchased with his partner Jerry Stillwell. “It looked like a home in the Garden District, with a big front porch and a porch swing.”

The house had hurricane damage—fences and a tree down—and was a mess inside after sitting empty for two years. But it had ten- to twelve-foot ceilings and 2,600 square feet.

“The hurricane really left it looking like a tear-down house,” says Burger. “But once we stepped inside and saw its high ceilings and fireplaces we knew we wanted to save it and restore it to its original charm. If a house can speak to you, this house was screaming at us to save it.

“It still had the old knob-and-tube wiring; we had it all rewired and updated the security system. We fixed the chimney, cleaned up the yard and got the fences back up. By March, I was ready to get to work.”

He started out buying damaged paintings, restoring them, and selling them online, building up a portfolio of work that he carefully photographed and documented. He also established a Web site, displaying before-and-after views of his work. “But word of mouth has been my best advertising,” says Burger, who calls his business Affordable Art Restoration.

 One piece he bought and restored was an unsigned New Orleans portrait that attracted the attention of art historian Estelle Pennington. “She told me it might be a portrait of Richard Clague,” says Burger. “It is in the original frame, which was in three pieces. The canvas stamp on the back helped me date it to 1850, as well as the way he was dressed. Estelle thinks it is a self-portrait by Clague.”  (Clague, 1821¬–73, is credited with establishing the Louisiana school of landscape painting. He influenced and taught many artists, including William Buck, Marshall J. Smith, and Charles Giroux.)

Burger also acquired a circa 1870 English landscape with shepherdess, signed F. Walker, in its original hand-carved frame. He bought it for $275, restored it, and sold it for $900. It was later appraised at $8,300.

The house where Burger lives and works is filled with art and cherished objects, including porcelain-head dolls with rosy cheeks and blue-glass eyes. He also collects ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes. “I collect them because I like them, but also because the people are wearing period clothing,” he says, explaining that he often uses the images for clues to help date a painting he is restoring.

He displays family portraits in his living room, including an alluring painting of a woman in a blue evening gown. “That’s Genevieve Cross,” says Burger. “She was engaged to my great-uncle, who died of pneumonia a month before the wedding. She married another man, but she stayed close to my family. She always wore a locket with my great-uncle’s picture in it.”

Stepping into the dining room he uses as a studio, Burger pulls a green full-length apron over his button down shirt and khakis. From the wall gazes his latest project, a portrait of Félicité Neda Chrétien that he is restoring for Frances and Dwight Winstead, who recently bought Chrétien Point Plantation in Sunset, Louisiana.

“The Winsteads bought some of the furniture with the house,” says Burger. “Mrs. Winstead called Patrick Dunne [owner of the New Orleans shop Lucullus] for advice on which furniture is antique and which reproduction. She told him she wanted to conserve and restore her paintings, and he recommended me. She looked at my portfolio and was impressed and decided I was the right person.”

Félicité married Hypolite Chrétien in 1818 in St. Landry Parish. In 1831, they began construction of the house now known as Chrétien Point, finishing it in 1835. Hypolite died in 1839 of yellow fever, according to Winstead. “Their son also died around the same time, and Félicité wore mourning for the rest of her life.”  The unsigned portrait of Félicité was made in the 1850s when she was in her 50s; she is dressed in black. She died in 1881, age 84, in New Orleans.

Compiling information on the Chrétien family, Frances Winstead is trying to distill fact from fiction. One story, as yet undocumented, has Félicité shooting a robber between the eyes as he climbed the stairs intent on plunder. Félicité also reputedly wore pants, rode to New Orleans on horseback, was an astute businesswoman, and played a mean game of poker. “There is a Confederate Rose chapter in Lafayette named for Félicité,” says Winstead. “They believe she was the first liberated woman in Louisiana. Basically, she was a tomboy.”

As Burger began work on Félicité just before Christmas, he discovered a great deal of overpainting, especially on her nose, eyebrows, and chin. He estimates the portrait had restoration work done around the turn of the century and again in the mid-1970s. Putty had been used to fill a hole in the canvas, possibly a bullet hole, consistent with stories that Yankee soldiers damaged the house during the Civil War.

Restoring a painting is an arduous process. Burger first removes the painting from the frame and cleans built-up dust from the back of the canvas. Then he stabilizes the loose areas of paint with a Beva treatment.

“Beva wax helps adhere the paint back to the canvas,” he says. “It is brushed on to the paint and draws it back down. It’s a wax solution in a chemical. As the chemical evaporates, it pulls the paint to the canvas. That’s the conservation you do before any restoration.

“Then comes the cleaning. I use conservator’s soap and other chemicals [applied] inch by inch, to remove what’s been overpainted. You start in the corner and work your way out, over every inch of the canvas.

“To figure out what’s been overpainted I use a black light. The old varnish will appear green. Anything that shows up dark purple or black is overpainting.”

Burger estimates he spends between twenty and forty hours to clean and restore one painting.
The work can be dangerous. “I wear a mask and gloves and [pay attention to] ventilation,” he says. “You’re dealing with carcinogens. With some chemicals I have to wear a respirator. As long as you’re well equipped and protected, you’re okay. The retouch paints have a chemical that’s very fume-y. I have to mix those colors outside.”

He is searching for a frame to replace the one added to Félicité’s portrait in the 1970s. “I'm scouring estate sales, estate auctions, and the Internet for a 28 x 36 period frame.  I don’t like cutting them down, because it takes away from the value.  I’ll rewire the frame and make sure it has the right gauge hangers. Older frames are solid wood and heavier than newer ones.”
For now, though, Burger is getting to know Félicité as he works his way through years and layers, removing old varnish and overpainting. “I’ve revealed a totally different lady with a more ladylike, slender neck,” he says. “Her lips had been overpainted, and so had her hair. I discovered a gauzy hat with ribbons tied to the side. I cleaned her hands, and now you can see the veins in them.”  

The process of discovery is both mysterious and exciting. “When I get a painting, I can see it restored before I even start removing the dirt and overpainting,” he says. “I’m like a sponge. I just start absorbing all this knowledge as I work on the piece.”

Ruth Laney is fascinated by those she calls Antiquarians—people who are in love with the past. “What distinguishes them all is passion—a love of history and a desire to inhabit the mysterious realm of the long-ago.”

(Original article and website)