Belizaire_and_the_Frey_Children
Bélizaire and the Frey Children
Portrait painting attributed to Jacques Amans
Bélizaire and the Frey Children is an 1837 group portrait painting attributed to the artist Jacques Amans that is a rare example of an enslaved person who is painted in a naturalistic manner.[1][2] It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.[1]
The painting shows the enslaved Afro-Creole teenager Bélizaire together with the three children of the New Orleans merchant and banker Frederick Frey.[3]
Frey's family purchased Bélizaire (b. 1822) and his mother, an enslaved woman named Sallie, when Bélizaire was six.[3][4] He was born in approximately 1822, so would have been about 15 years old when the portrait was painted. In 1856 Bélizaire was sold to be enslaved on the Evergreen Plantation, a sugar plantation in Louisiana, and researchers have been unable to determine what happened to him after 1860. The painting is the only known image that exists of one of the 400 persons who were enslaved at the Evergreen Plantation.[5][2]
Two of the Frey children in the painting died the same year it was painted,[3] and the other did not survive to adulthood.[5]