The painting Bélizaire and the Frey children was acquired in the spring by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), in New York, which is preparing to exhibit it in its rooms. The history of the painting begins in 1837 in New Orleans, when the banker and merchant Frederick Frey commissioned Jacques Amans, a French portrait painter of local elites. Her three children, Elizabeth, Léontine and Frederick Frey Jr., pose, pink and smiling, against the backdrop of the bayou. What is surprising is the presence of a young dreaming slave, who dominates the composition, and its careful pictorial treatment, unusual at the time. This child is then unknown.
Decades passed, the painting was unceremoniously transported by the descendants of the Freys, then, in 1973, given to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). And if we only see the three little Freys, it is not because of the dust: the young black man has quite simply been obliterated, blended into the decor. By who ? For what ? No one knows. Although his ghost can be distinguished under the brushstrokes, NOMA simply stored the painting until 2005, when it was sold by Christie’s to an antiques dealer in Virginia. A heavy restoration later, the black boy reappears, but remains anonymous.
When, in 2013 and through random online research, collector Jeremy K. Simien came across before-and-after photos of the painting, he became “haunted”: he had to discover the identity of “this son of Louisiana, this to be worthy, to be remembered,” he explains in the “Curious Objects” podcast. In 2021, he located the painting, bought it from a Washington collector who now owned it, then hired Louisiana historian Katy Morlas Shannon. Which goes back to a baby born in 1822 to an unknown father and a slave mother bought by the Freys as a cook. As a result, both live near the masters, he becoming guardian of the children. But when the patriarch dies, it’s uprooted: the widow sells him and his trace disappears. One name remains: Bélizaire.
If the Met acquired the painting in the spring, it was to break with “romanticized American art history,” explains a museum curator to the New York Times daily. Understand: In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s time to expose the roots of systemic inequality. NOMA, for its part, recognizes “an error” and mentions the lack of resources, which does not prevent the ire of the experts. As for social networks, they are teeming with questions. What if Belizaire was Father Frey’s illegitimate son, a common occurrence in slaveholding families? Did he survive the Civil War? Did he experience the status of a free man? Today he reaches posterity – if not a reparation, then a consolation.