Bélizaire and the Frey Children represents one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits to come to light of an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his Southern White enslaver.
The work is also a moving recognition of loss (two of the White children died the same year the portrait was painted) and an act of recovery.
The prominent figure of the enslaved teenager, Bélizaire (ca. 1822-after 1860), positioned above the three younger children in his care, was presumably painted out by a member of the Frey family in the late 19th or early 20th century, and only recently uncovered.
Through careful conservation and historical research, the story of the depicted subjects has been identified, revealing the complex relationships of intimacy and trauma that slavery bred.
The portrait is strongly attributed to the French neoclassical painter Jacques Amans, the leading portraitist working in New Orleans in the late 1830s through the 1850s.
He was commissioned by the successful German-born merchant and banker Frederick Frey, whose three-story home stood on Royal Street in the French Quarter.
Placed against a representative, bucolic Louisiana landscape, the dignified Bélizaire is sensitively portrayed, set above and apart from the Frey children, and seemingly absorbed in thought.
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