Bélizaire e as crianças Frey

In 1837, a German-born banker in New Orleans named Frederick Frey sat his three children for a portrait and had a fourth figure included: Bélizaire, an enslaved Afro-Creole teenager the family had bought along with his mother when the boy was six. He stands at the back, most likely the children's caretaker. None of those three children lived to adulthood. Sometime around 1900 someone painted Bélizaire out of the canvas entirely, leaving the white children alone, and for most of a century the picture passed as an ordinary family group. Conservators uncovered him again only recently, matching the figure to Louisiana property records that named him. The Met hung the restored painting in 2023, in its American Wing.