Jacques Amans

For about a century, the painting now called Bélizaire and the Frey Children showed only three white children. The fourth figure, a teenage boy standing behind them with his arms crossed, had been painted out, probably around 1900, when segregation was hardening across the American South. Bélizaire was about 15 and enslaved by the Frey family of New Orleans. After the collector Jeremy Simien bought the canvas, conservators uncovered him again, and in 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it, calling it the first naturalistic picture of a named enslaved person in a Southern setting.

The painting, made around 1837, is attributed to Jacques Amans. Born in 1801 in Maastricht, then part of France, Amans showed portraits at the Paris Salon in the 1830s and by 1837 had crossed to New Orleans, on the same ship as the painter Jean Joseph Vaudechamp. He became the leading portraitist in Louisiana, and his polished Neoclassical manner suited French-speaking Creole merchants and the planters along the Mississippi.

He worked there until 1856, then returned to France, where he died in 1888. Within a few years of the portrait the Frey children had died young, and in 1857 Bélizaire was taken to a sugar plantation known today as Evergreen.