Bélizaire and the Frey Children
This painting is attributed to Jacques Amans, the leading French émigré portraitist working in New Orleans during the 1830s-50s. The portrait depicts Bélizaire (ca. 1822—after 1865), an enslaved Afro-Creole teenager, with the family of his enslaver — a rare subject that illuminates the close but inhumane relationships that defined domestic slavery and its afterlives. Bélizaire is positioned against a suggestive Louisiana landscape above the three young Frey siblings presumably in his care. At the turn of the twentieth century, his image was deliberately concealed by a member of the Frey family. A century later he was revealed after careful conservation treatment, and research recovered the sitters’ identities. Bélizaire survived the Civil War and lived to be free; both girls died the year the portrait was painted and their brother nearly a decade later.
Artwork Details
- Title: Bélizaire and the Frey Children
- Artist: Attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (Franco-American, Maastricht (then under French rule) 1801–1888 Paris)
- Date: ca. 1837
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 47 1/4 × 36 1/4 in. (120 × 92.1 cm)
- Credit Line: Purchase, Acquisitions Fund, Brooke Russell Astor Bequest, Friends of the American Wing Fund, Muriel J. Kogan Bequest, and funds from various donors, 2023
- Object Number: 2023.317
- Curatorial Department: The American Wing
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