Now on view in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is Bélizaire and the Frey Children (1837), a group portrait that features the first named Black subject naturalistically portrayed in a Southern landscape to enter the museum’s collection. “The acquisition of this rare painting is transformative,” says Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing. “[This work] allows us to address many collection absences and asymmetries as we approach the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wing’s founding in 1924.”
Readers of The Magazine ANTIQUES and listeners to our podcast, Curious Objects, became well familiar last year with this extraordinary painting and its compelling history. Bélizaire and the Frey Children was the subject of the cover of ANTIQUES’ September/October 2022 issue, and was the topic discussed in a wonderful three-part episode of Curious Objects (which you can find here).
For the uninformed: the painting is attributed to Jacques Amans, a French portraitist who set up shop in New Orleans in the 1830s. He painted the work on commission from the merchant Frederick Frey. It depicts the three Frey children—Elizabeth, Léontine, and Frederick Jr.—and an enslaved Afro-Creole teenager named Bélizaire (ca. 1822—after 1860), who apparently served as a combination babysitter and companion to the children. (Later, when the Frey family fortunes turned, in 1857 Bélizaire was sold to a sugar plantation, where he labored as a cook and houseman.) The placement in the painting composition of Bélizaire, who is standing a bit behind the children, is significant, says Elizabeth Kornhauser, a curator emerita at The Met: Amans “revealed the nuanced racial tension of the time in the composition, portraying fifteen-year-old Bélizaire lost in thought and subtly set apart from the children of his White enslaver.”
At some point in the late nineteenth- or early twentieth century, a member of the Frey family had Bélizaire’s figure painted over for unknown reasons. “In 1972,” according to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, where the restored painting was recently exhibited, “Audrey Grasser, the great-great-granddaughter of Coralie Frey [Frederic Frey’s wife], donated the painting to a Louisiana museum, informing the curatorial staff that the figure of an enslaved person had once been included in the composition. Over the course of the painting’s life at the museum, no conservation efforts were undertaken to reverse the damage caused by the erasure of the enslaved subject.” In 2005, the museum deaccessioned the painting at auction. The art dealer who bought it undertook a preliminary restoration, which revealed Bélizaire again.
The painting was subsequently purchased by Jeremy K. Simien, a historian and self-described art and antique sleuth based in Baton Rouge. He obtained the painting during a search for decorative objects and art related to his home state of Louisiana. Intrigued by the portrait, Simien has worked diligently to unravel the mystery of Bélizaire’s life by conducting historical research and sharing his findings with other scholars and the public.
Simien told ANTIQUES, he wanted the artwork “to go to a museum that was on the forefront of corrective history and transparency…and allow for an expansion of narratives and scholarship.” And with the assistance of an art firm, he found a home at the Met. “It’s the Met. It’s synonymous with the best and excellence,” says Simien. “I’m very pleased. I’m excited.” He has the hope that by publicly displaying the artwork, more information will be revealed. “It’ll inspire others to start looking around.”
The Met wall labels that accompany the painting, from left to right as placed by American Wing curators, can be found here: perspective label written by Dr. Mia L. Bagneris; gallery label; and conservation gallery label.
Bélizaire and the Frey Children • Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Wing • Ongoing • metmuseum.org
