The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York bought the picture Bélizaire and the Frey Children in the spring and is getting ready to put it on display. The painting's story starts in 1837 in New Orleans, when banker and trader Frederick Frey hired French portrait artist Jacques Amans to paint the city's most important people. Elizabeth, Léontine, and Frederick Frey Jr., his three children, smile and stand against a bayou background. Surprising is the young slave sleeping that takes up most of the picture and the care with which it was painted, which wasn't common at the time. At the time, no one knows who this child is. After many years, the picture was moved around by the Freys' children and grandchildren without any ceremony. In 1973, it was given to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). And it's not because of the dust that we can only see the three little Freys; the young black man was just erased, blended into the background. Who made it? Why? No one knows. Even though we can see his ghost under the paint, NOMA was happy to store the picture until 2005, when Christie's sold it to an antique dealer in Virginia. After a heavy repair, the black boy came back, but no one knew who he was.

In 2013, collector Jeremy K. Simien was looking for something online and came across before-and-after pictures of the painting. It "haunted" him—he had to find out who "this son of Louisiana, this worthy being, let us remember him," he says in the podcast "Curious Objects." In 2021, he found the picture and bought it from a collector in Washington, D.C. He then hired Katy Morlas Shannon, a historian from Louisiana. Who linked it to a child born in 1822 to a father they didn't know and a slave mother the Freys hired as a cook. So, they both moved in with the adults and he became the children's guardian. When the patriarch died, though, things went badly. His wife sold the land, and no sign of him was found. There was only one first name left: Bélizaire. A museum curator told the New York Times that the Met bought the picture in the spring to break with "romanticized American art history." This means that after the Black Lives Matter movement, it is time to show where structural inequality comes from. NOMA says it made "a mistake" and says it doesn't have enough resources, but that doesn't stop the experts from being angry. There are a lot of questions about social networks. What if Bélizaire was Father Frey's child by someone else? This happens a lot in families that own slaves. Did he make it through the Civil War? Did he know what it was like to be free? Today, he has access to future generations, which is, if not a reward, then at least a comfort. www.vwart.com seen in France