MET acquires rare 19th century portrait of slave child

The painting of 15-year-old Bélizaire with the children of the family that enslaved him was restored to its original composition after his figure was covered around 1900.

The work, attributed to French artist Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, based in New Orleans, represents an individualistic representation of an enslaved person and the family of their enslaver that is considered extremely rare. The figure of Bélizaire was painted approximately 50 years later, but after a century, "Bélizaire and the Frey Children" (c. 1837) was restored to its original composition. It will be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall.

The Frey family enslaved Bélizaire and her mother Sally in 1828. Sally likely worked as a domestic cook, while Bélizaire worked inside the family home in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Frederick Frey was a German-born merchant and his wife Coralie D'Aunoy Favre was from a long line of wealthy New Orleanians. The couple's three children - Elizabeth, Léontine and Frederick Jr. - sit below Bélizaire in the portrait, looking at the viewer as Bélizaire looks away, seemingly in contemplation as he stands confidently with his arms crossed.

A few years after the portrait was executed, all three of Frey's children died. The family fell into debt, and in 1857 Bélizaire was transferred to a sugar plantation in Louisiana, now known as Evergreen Plantation.

The story of Bélizaire's (and the Freys') life was uncovered in recent years by historian Katy Morlas Shannon. She was hired by Jeremy K. Simien, a Baton Rouge collector who bought the painting from a Virginia antiques dealer, who acquired the work at auction at Christie's. Before that, "Bélizaire and the Frey Children" was part of the New Orleans Museum of Art's collection. Bélizaire's image was still hidden, and the institution told the New York Times that it had not exhibited the painting due to its poor condition and unidentified subjects. After the museum sold the portrait, the work was restored and Bélizaire's image resurfaced.

Judging by the cracks in the painting, conservator Craig Crawford thinks Bélizaire was painted around 1900, during a time of deepening segregation and violence against black people in the American South. "No white person of any social status in New Orleans at that time would want a black person to be portrayed with their family," Shannon told the New York Times.

Although the portrait painter was a white man, some prominent freed black artists lived and worked in New Orleans in the decades before the Civil War, and freed blacks sometimes achieved economic success in the city. Painter Julien Hudson was among them: he studied in France and made portraits of the upper echelons of New Orleans society in the mid-19th century.

In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, Sylvia Yount, the Met curator responsible for the American wing, called the painting "transformational" for the department. Yount said the work "allows us to address many absences and asymmetries in the collection" as the museum approaches the centennial of the American art department.

Source: HyperAllergic