At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the story of Bélizaire, a young slave long hidden in a painting

For a long time, the three children from a wealthy home in New Orleans seemed the only characters in a forgotten painting, attributed to the Frenchman Jacques Amans. The family slave, Bélizaire, had been erased from the painting, now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

For the large museum which borders Central Park in Manhattan, it is “the first naturalistic representation of an enslaved person whose name we have, in the South” of the United States, where slavery was officially abolished in 1865, emphasizes the curator of the Met's wing devoted to American art, Sylvia Yount. “We have no other similar work in the collection and this allows us to tell a lot of different, interesting and complex stories,” she adds to AFP, in front of the painting, an oil on canvas by 1837, on display to the public since Thursday.

However, the figure in the background of the young servant, who stands straight, arms crossed and gaze deep, almost disappeared forever from the painting commissioned by the father of the family, Frederick Frey, a banker by origin German based in New Orleans.

Without knowing the exact reason, and probably at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Frey couple had died and the painting passed into the hands of heirs, the mixed-race teenager was obscured by repainting. “The family may not have been proud of having a slave in a painting, because it meant being seen as a slave-holding family. The other hypothesis is that they did not want a black character next to their white ancestors,” supposes Sylvia Yount.

The painting landed in the collections of the New Orleans Art Museum in 1972, where it languished for more than 30 years in reserves, before being sold in 2004. It was not until 2005 that it was restored, initiative of a new owner, and the figure of the young servant reappears.

But it is thanks to a collector from Baton Rouge in Louisiana, Jeremy K. Simien, passionate about the representations of Creoles and Afro-Creoles in the art of his region that the painting emerges from anonymity. He first discovered the restored work on an auction site, then, while searching the sales history, its truncated version sold by the New Orleans museum. “I could see the image through it, I could see the contours (...) it really impressed me,” he told AFP. The collector eventually acquired the painting in 2021. He hired a specialist historian, Katy Shannon, who searched Louisiana archives to discover that the young servant painted on the work was named Bélizaire, and that it was sold to 6 years old in 1828, with his mother, to the Frey family.

Of the three Frey children, two died the year the painting was painted, and the third a few years later. Bélizaire, the only survivor of the painting, was later sold to a sugar cane plantation, but according to historical research, he lived through the end of slavery. “It’s incredible, I find this story fascinating because it’s almost as if Bélizaire, this boy whose name we didn’t know, refused to be erased,” says Jeremy K. Simien.

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“In a way, it serves as a representation of a lot of history that has been erased or replaced. And I'm very happy that they understood this at the Metropolitan Museum, which acquired the painting, he adds. The terms of the transaction between the collector and the museum remained confidential. At the Met, the work is presented with its history and a photo of its version without Bélizaire. “We need to tell these more complicated stories,” assures Sylvia Yount.