Bélizaire and the Frey Children

This painting is attributed to Jacques Amans, the leading French émigré portraitist working in New Orleans during the 1830s-50s. The portrait depicts Bélizaire (ca. 1822—after 1865), an enslaved Afro-Creole teenager, with the family of his enslaver — a rare subject that illuminates the close but inhumane relationships that defined domestic slavery and its afterlives. Bélizaire is positioned against a suggestive Louisiana landscape above the three young Frey siblings presumably in his care. At the turn of the twentieth century, his image was deliberately concealed by a member of the Frey family. A century later he was revealed after careful conservation treatment, and research recovered the sitters’ identities. Bélizaire survived the Civil War and lived to be free; both girls died the year the portrait was painted and their brother nearly a decade later.