Hidden No More: An Enslaved Child’s Portrait, Once Erased, Arrives at the Met

NEW YORK — For many years, a 19th-century painting of three white children in a Louisiana landscape held a secret. Beneath a layer of overpaint meant to look like the sky: the figure of an enslaved youth.

Covered up for reasons that remain unspecified, the image of the young man of African descent was erased from the work around the turn of the last century and languished for decades in attics and a museum basement.

But a 2005 restoration revealed him, and now the painting has a new, very prominent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I’ve been wanting to add such a work to the Met’s collection for the past 10 years,” said Betsy Kornhauser, the curator for American paintings and sculpture who handled the acquisition, “and this is the extraordinary work that appeared.”

Kornhauser said the museum acquired the work, known as “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” this year, as part of its larger effort to reframe how it tells the story of American art. The painting, attributed to Jacques Amans, a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite, will hang in the American Wing this fall and again next year during the wing’s centennial celebration.

One reason “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” has drawn attention is the naturalistic depiction of Bélizaire, the young man of African descent who occupies the highest position in the painting, leaning against a tree just behind the Frey children. Although he remains separated from the white children, Amans painted him in a powerful stance, with blushing cheeks and a kind of interiority that is unusual for the time.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)Since the Black Lives Matter movement, the Met and other museums have responded to calls to reckon with the presentation of Black figures. When the European Galleries reopened in 2020, the museum included wall texts to highlight the presence of African people in Europe and to call attention to issues of racism, previously unmentioned. In the American Wing, which had presented “a romanticized history of American art,” Kornhauser said, a presidential portrait was recast with the consciousness of the present: John Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of George Washington and his enslaved servant William Lee, identified only the former president until 2020, when Lee’s name was added to the title. However, unlike Bélizaire, Lee is depicted at the margins, lacking any emotion or humanity.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)Jeremy Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, spent years trying to find the painting with the enslaved youth after seeing an image of it online in 2014, following its restoration, that featured all four figures. Intrigued, he kept searching and found an earlier image from 2005, after the painting had been deaccessioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art and was listed for auction by Christie’s. It was the same painting, but the young Black man was missing. He had been painted out.

“The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview.

For years, Simien looked for the painting in old auction records, catalogs and photo archives. He asked friends if anyone had seen it and someone had, in an antiques shop in Virginia. From there Simien tracked the painting to a private collection in Washington and eventually purchased it for an undisclosed amount.

At the time, he didn’t know who any of the people in the portrait were. But he was drawn to the story of the Black youth and the attempt to erase him.

“We knew we needed to find out who he was, as a son of Louisiana,” said Simien, “and as somebody who is worthy of being remembered or known.”

Simien hired Katy Morlas Shannon, a Louisiana historian who researches the lives of enslaved individuals. She figured out the identities of everyone in the portrait and used property and census records to land on a name for the young man who had been covered up: Bélizaire.

From there, Shannon pieced together the details of Bélizaire’s life. He was born in 1822 in the French Quarter. His mother was named Sallie. His father is unknown. Bélizaire had other brothers and sisters — all but one were sold away.

When he was 6, Bélizaire and his mother were sold to Frederick Frey, a banker and merchant who, with his wife, Coralie, and their family, lived in a large French Quarter home on Royal Street, and owned a number of enslaved people.

Bélizaire is listed as a domestic and his mother as a cook, roles that would have kept them in proximity to the family.

Records suggest the portrait was painted around 1837, when Bélizaire was 15. He was the only person in the painting to survive to adulthood. Two Frey sisters, Elizabeth and Léontine, died the same year, likely of yellow fever. Their brother Frederick died a few years later.

Nearly 20 years later, after the elder Frederick Frey’s businesses had faltered and he died, his widow sold Bélizaire to Evergreen Plantation. Shannon, who was employed by the plantation at the time of her research, said he is the only enslaved person at the plantation for whom there is an image.

Bélizaire was listed on inventories until 1861, when the Civil War began. Soon after, New Orleans fell to the Union Army.

“Did he survive past the Civil War and live long enough to experience freedom?” Shannon said. “We don’t know because the trail stops.”

The portrait remained in the Frey family for more than a century. It is unclear when Bélizaire was painted out but Craig Crawford, a conservator who did additional restoration work last year, estimates that based on the crackular pattern, the cover-up likely happened sometime around 1900. Who did it and why are unknown, but segregation is known to have deepened in turn of the century New Orleans. Shannon said about the era, “No white person of any social standing in New Orleans at that time would have wanted a Black person portrayed with their family on their wall.”

In the 1950s, Eugene Grasser, Coralie Frey’s great-great-great grandson, remembers picking the painting up from the attic of an elderly aunt with his father, and strapping it to the roof of their car (along with another family portrait later identified as the work of Jacques Amans). They stored it in a garage behind his parents’ house.

In 1971, Grasser’s mother offered him the work, but the painting did not fit with his modernist décor. So it was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Photographs of the painting, then called “Three Children in a Landscape,” show a fourth figure ghosting through. According to museum documents, the portrait contained “the slave who took care of the children.”

The New Orleans museum did not clean or restore the painting and put it into storage for 32 years until the museum de-accessioned the work.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)The former director of the museum, John Bullard, said the decision to sell the painting came at a time when the children were unidentified and the artist was unknown.

“It was not in exhibitable condition,” he added, “so the museum would have had to invest a certain amount of money to have it totally reconditioned.”

“I think in hindsight it was a mistake,” he acknowledged. “Mistakes happen.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)At auction, the painting sold for $6,000 to an antiques dealer from Virginia who was interested in what might be under the overpaint. He asked a conservator, Katja Grauman, to do a test cleaning.

She treated small areas where the figure appeared to be and first revealed a coat and then a face. “We’ve restored plenty of American portraits of children and very rarely do you see a Black person in it,” she said.

The dealer later sold the painting to a private collector in Washington, where Simien found it in 2021, seven years into his search.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)The New Orleans Museum of Art, by then aware that the enslaved youth had been uncovered, expressed excitement about reacquiring the work, Simien said, but he became frustrated that they did not move faster, and acquired the painting himself.

Mia Bagneris, professor of art history and Africana studies at Tulane University, who taught a class about “Bélizaire,” called the museum’s decision to deaccession the work and failure to rectify the mistake “unconscionable” and said it had a responsibility to ensure that its staff, its board and its collection represent “all of the people who live here.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)Neither the Met nor Simien would disclose what the museum paid for the Frey family portrait. But 19th century portraits of people of African descent, even with unidentified sitters, have drawn high prices. In January 2023, a portrait of two girls, one white and one African American, sold at Christie’s for just under $1 million. In May 2022, at an auction in North Carolina, a portrait of a free woman of color sold for $984,000 to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

The Met plans to investigate the Frey family painting to learn more about Bélizaire’s life. What led to his inclusion in such an intimate family portrait? Did he survive the Civil War? Are there descendants?

But the identification of Bélizaire, who had been purposefully erased, is a startling discovery. Met officials said the painting is actually the first naturalistic portrait in the American Wing of a named Black subject set in a Southern landscape.

To have “the full documented information about this young man who appears in the portrait is really extraordinary,” Kornhauser said.

It was crucial to the Met’s decision to acquire the work. Without Simien and Shannon’s efforts to uncover his identity, the painting would likely still be in a private collection, out of view, waiting to be known.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.