Bélizaire and the Frey Children

Bélizaire and the Frey Children is an 1837 group portrait painting attributed to the artist Jacques Amans that is a rare example of an enslaved person who is painted in a naturalistic manner. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.
The painting shows the enslaved Afro-Creole teenager Bélizaire together with the three children of the wealthy German-born New Orleans merchant, financier, and possible diplomat Frederick or Frédéric Frey.
Frey's family purchased Bélizaire and his mother, Sallie, in 1828. Bélizaire was six years old at the time. Bélizaire was possibly of mixed race. He had siblings who had been sold and separated from Sallie. Bélizaire was born in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Historical records do not identify his father. The Freys also enslaved a number of other people in addition to Bélizaire and his mother, Sallie. The Frey family resided in a three-story townhouse near the French Quarter. His inclusion in the portrait likely signifies Bélizaire’s importance to the Frey family. Bélizaire might have accompanied Frédéric Frey when he traveled and might have been tasked with caring for the three Frey children, Élisabeth Coralie, born in 1828; Frédéric Émile, born in 1832, and Léontine, born in 1833. His appearance in the portrait is more like a peer or a half-sibling than of a slave, since Bélizaire is as well-dressed as the three younger children in the portrait and poses with confidence. While his exact relationship to the Frey family is not known, it is possible that he was related by blood to the other children in the portrait and might have been a son of Frédéric Frey. “Children of the plantation” were not uncommon in New Orleans. Bélizaire was born in approximately 1822, so would have been about 15 years old when the portrait was painted. Two of the Frey children in the painting, Élisabeth and Léontine, died of yellow fever in 1837, the year the portrait was painted. Their brother, Frédéric Émile Frey Jr., died in 1846 at the age of 13 or 14. The youngest Frey child, a girl who was not included in the portrait, was the only one of the Frey children to survive to adulthood.
The Frey family experienced financial difficulties during a recession. According to one family story, Frédéric Frey became angry with Bélizaire, sold him, and had him painted out of the portrait. Records show that Bélizaire was sold in 1841, when he was about nineteen, to pay off the Frey family’s debts, though the Frey family bought him back soon afterwards. Frédéric Frey died in 1851. Following Frédéric Frey’s death, his businesses went bankrupt. His widow, Marie Colette Coralie Favre D'aunoy Frey, later sold Bélizaire for $1,200 to sugar planter Lézin Becnel in 1857 to be enslaved on the Evergreen Plantation. Bélizaire‘s mother, Sallie, was also sold at the same time to be enslaved on the Evergreen Plantation. Bélizaire worked there as a cook and domestic servant. Records show that Bélizaire was sold at least three times, but survived to be emancipated at the end of the American Civil War. The last known record of him appears in the 1865 records of the Freedmen's Bureau in New Orleans. He was 37 years old at the time. The painting is the only known image that exists of one of the 400 persons who were enslaved at the Evergreen Plantation.
It is uncertan exactly when the figure of Bélizaire was painted out of the composite. According to one family legend, it happened around the time he was sold. Contemporary researchers believe a Frey family descendant had the figure painted out around the turn of the 20th century. When the family donated the painting to the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1972, the museum was informed that an enslaved person had been painted out, but no action was taken by the museum.
The painting was deaccessioned from the museum's collection in 2005, and the acquirer removed the overpaint.
The collector Jeremy K. Simien purchased the painting in 2021. Simien had it further restored by Craig Crawford, who removed remaining overpaint. (Crawford had earlier restored another New Orleans painting where lace had been painted over because a restorer had incorrectly determined that the subject would not have worn lace, because of her race.) Simien also commissioned the historian Katy Morlas Shannon to research Bélizaire's identity and history, thus recovering his name and year of birth which was previously unrecorded in the museum documentation.
The painting is the "first naturalistic portrait of a named Black subject set in a Southern landscape" in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum. Its display is part of a national trend in museums and Southern historic sites to "address their history of slavery and how ... wealth was accumulated".