From the 8.15.23 story by Sarah Cascone on news.artnet.com:
"New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired a rare 19th-century portrait featuring an enslaved person, helping restore to view a young mixed-race boy who was painted out of history—figuratively and literally—for over 100 years. It will go on view in the museum’s American Wing this fall.
“The acquisition of this rare painting is transformative for the American Wing, representing our first naturalistic portrait of a named Black subject set in a Louisiana landscape—a work that allows us to address many collection absences and asymmetries as we approach the 100th anniversary of the wing’s founding in 2024,” Sylvia Yount, curator of the Met’s American Wing, said in a statement.
The canvas, titled Bélizaire and the Frey Children, dates to about 1837, when it was commissioned by Frederick Frey, a German-born banker and merchant who lived in the French Quarter with his wife, Coralie D’Aunoy Frey, and their family. It depicts three of the couple’s children—Elizabeth, Léontine, and Frederick Jr.—and an enslaved teenager named Bélizaire.
Uncovering Bélizaire’s identity was a passion project spearheaded by Louisiana art collector Jeremy K. Simien, who turned to art history as a means of better understanding of his own family origins as a ninth-generation Creole of mixed African and European descent. He first saw a photo of the painting in 2013, in an old auction lot attributing the work to either Trevor Thomas Fowler or Theodore Sydney Moise. He was eventually able to track the canvas down thanks to an Instagram tip from art dealer Taylor Thistlethwaite."
(photo below shows Jeremy K. Simien with Bélizaire and the Frey Children, attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucein Amans, after it was restored, removing overpainting that obscured the figure of an enslaved boy. Photo courtesy of Jeremy K. Simien.)
Summary from the The New York Times You Tube channel: "The
Met recently acquired “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” a 19th-century
Louisiana portrait with a secret: For over a 100 years, the image of an
enslaved child was erased. This is his story."
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