Bélizaire and the Frey Children

Attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans Franco-American

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 755

This painting is attributed to Jacques Amans, the leading French émigré portraitist working in New Orleans during the 1830s-50s. The portrait depicts a known Black individual with the family of his enslaver, a rare subject that illuminates the close but inhumane relationships that defined domestic slavery and its afterlives. At the turn of the twentieth century, the prominent depiction of the enslaved Afro-Creole teenager, Bélizaire (ca. 1822—after 1865), who is positioned against a suggestive Louisiana landscape above the three young Frey siblings presumably in his care, was deliberately concealed—likely 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.

#4022. Belizaire and the Frey Children

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Bélizaire and the Frey Children, Attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (Franco-American, Maastricht (then under French rule) 1801–1888 Paris), Oil on canvas

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