The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired a newly restored piece of history: a portrait of three white children and their enslaved caretaker.
Now, people can see the Louisiana treasure the former owner says was too important to be in a private collection.
The portrait is now called Bélizaire and the Frey Children and was commissioned in 1837 by Frederick Frey, a German-born family man living in Louisiana.
According to the Met, the painting “represents one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits of a Black individual depicted with the family of his White enslaver.”
Frey, the enslaver, had hoped to have a painting featuring his three children, Elizabeth, Léontine and Frederick Jr.
The merchant and banker also allowed his 15-year-old servant to be featured in the painting with his children.
Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, a French neoclassical painter, was hired for the job. He positioned the two daughters and the son in the front, leaving the Afro-Creole teenager, identified as Bélizaire, in the shadows leaning up against a tree. However, up until a few years ago, the enslaved domestic was all but erased from history.
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