During the 1970s a haunting painting featuring three white children was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art. The donor of the painting knew a mystery hid just over the shoulders of the three young children. There, a shape hovered ever so softly and eerily undefined, appearing to have been blotted out from the portrait.
At the time, the donor Audrey Grasser, stated to museum staff she believed a fourth child, an enslaved child, may have once been featured in the artwork alongside the white children.
If anyone would know, it would be Grasser, as she is the direct descendant of Coralie Frey, the wife of Frederick Frey who had the portrait commissioned, possibly by a local artist named Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans a French neoclassical painter, in around 1837. Frey was a German-born merchant and banker who lived in the French Quarter of Louisiana. Historians have remarked on how much like family the boy must have been for Frey to request he be painted alongside his children in the family portrait. Frey’s children were: Elizabeth, Léontine and Frederick Jr.
Intrigued by Grasser’s information, experts set to work restoring the artwork to its original state- which meant bringing back to history the little enslaved child long hidden within the paint layers. His image now revealed, experts identified the child as 15-year old Bélizaire, most likely a caretaker for the Frey children.
Records reveal the Frey family purchased Bélizaire and his mother Sally, when he was just six- years old. Reasons are unclear, but the family later sold him to Evergreen Plantation in 1856. From there, Bélizaire’s story truly is lost to history.
In the fall of 2023 the painting, titled Bélizaire and the Frey Children, went on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum has previously described the painting as “one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits of a Black individual depicted with the family of his white enslaver.”
The painting has changed hands many times over the years- at times languishing in museum back rooms, at others, sold at auction. Through it all the ghostly image behind the three children has haunted all of its owners- the little boy always begging to be seen.
