The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced that they had purchased an important nineteenth-century painting attributed to Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans. The painting is the first naturalistic portrait of a named Black subject in an American landscape to enter the museum’s collection. Betty Kornhauser, curator for American paintings at the Met enthused “I’ve been wanting to add such a work to the Met’s collection for the past 10 years, and this is the extraordinary work that appeared.”

The painting is titled Bélizaire and the Frey Children (c.1837) and has been described as representing “one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits of a Black individual depicted with the family of his White enslaver.” The central focus of this painting is undoubtedly the realistic rendering of an enslaved child with the children of the slave owner. However, the enslaved figure was overpainted, likely at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is thanks to a historian and collector from Louisiana, Jeremy K. Simien, that the true story behind this painting has been uncovered.

Simien first came across this painting in a photo in 2013, at which point some recent restoration had revealed that it had four figures, rather than just the three Frey children. Simien became interested in figuring out who the Black child in the painting was. He was shocked to uncover a 2005 image of the painting which showed that the child had been overpainted. Simien tracked down the painting and purchased it, before sending it for further conservation work to reveal the full portrait of the child. Louisiana-based historian Katy Morlas Shannon worked with Simien using census records to figure out the name and birth year of the enslaved child. They discovered that he was called Bélizaire and had been born in 1822. Bélizaire and his mother Sally had been purchased by the Frey family and Bélizaire is recorded as a ‘domestic’. In all likelihood, given his placement in the painting, he was the caretaker for the Frey children.

In 1972, a descendant of one of the Frey family, Audrey Grassar, donated the painting to the New Orleans Museum of Art. Grassar informed them that the faint outline in the portrait once depicted an enslaved person. The painting received no further research and remained in the basement of the museum until it was deaccessioned and sold at auction in 2005 for $7,200. John Bullard, the New Orleans Museum of Art director at the time of the deaccessioning told The New York Times, “I think in hindsight, it was a mistake, yes—but mistakes happen.” The Met, however, are evidently very enthusiastic about their important purchase. Max Hollein, the Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO said, “Bélizaire and the Frey Children is a highly significant addition to The Met’s collection and a further step on our path to broadening and diversifying the narratives in our galleries. The deeply compelling and rare painting carries immense historical and artistic significance, and represents an important milestone in our ongoing commitment to sharing profound stories of identities and place, as well as memory and erasure.”

Sylvia Young, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in charge of the American Wing at the MET added: “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 Southern 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.”

For his part, Simien was excited to sell the painting on to a museum. “The aura was too great to be in a private collection. I had a duty to place it somewhere with the best interpretation, the safest, where it wouldn’t be forgotten again.”