Everyone has a story, so they say. Two are known to Bélizaire and neither one nor the other is fully known.
His biographical book is a 19th-century canvas attributed to Frenchman Jacques Amans, a 19th-century Louisiana elite portrait painter.
For many years, the story of Bélizaire was censored, hidden, without knowing the reason, although the racist prejudices of the southern United States cannot be forgotten.
The painting of a landscape with three white minors (two girls and one boy) kept a secret under what seemed like a piece of the horizon. A restoration revealed that behind that stain was a black teenager. The New York Metropolitan Museum, which has acquired it, will exhibit it starting in the fall, without revealing all the unknowns surrounding this case.
Bélizaire's "artistic" disappearance occurred around 1900. "No white person of social status at that time in New Orleans would have had a black person in his family portrait," explains historian Katy Morlas Shannon in The New York times . Despite this argument, Amans made a naturalistic description of the black adolescent and placed him in the highest position, leaning against a tree. Although he is separated from the trio, the young African maintains a powerful stamp and an unusual aura of interiority.
The collector Jeremy K. Simien, from Baton Rouge, set out to find that painting in which the young black man appeared, after seeing an image on the internet once restored. He continued the search and found a 2005 reproduction featuring only the three white children, shortly after the New Orleans Museum of Art declassified it and put it up for sale at Christie's. Both paintings were the same, but in one the young black man had been removed. He followed the trail, which led him to a Virginia antiques dealer and from there to a private collection in Washington, where he purchased it.
It was a riddle. At the museum it had been titled Three Children in a Landscape. In the documents it was found that there was a fourth ghostly figure, "the slave who took care of the children." But they neglected to clean it and reveal the mystery.
Simien was curious to know who was who on that canvas. He contacted Shannon, who has dedicated herself to investigating the lives of slaves.
The work was commissioned in 1837 by Frederick Frey, a wealthy German merchant and banker, and his wife, Coralie d'Aunoy Favre, a member of a distinguished family in New Orleans since colonial times.
Thanks to property records, the historian was able to find out that this young black man was called Bélizaire. He was born in 1822, in the French Quarter of Louisiana City. His mother vouched for Sallie. His father was unknown and he had other siblings. At the age of six, Bélizaire and his mother were sold to the Freys, who resided in downtown New Orleans and already owned other slaves. Sallie is listed as a cook, and his son as a domestic helper.
Of the four who appear in the portrait, he was the only one who reached adulthood. At the end of 1837, the same year that Amans painted the painting, the sisters Elizabeth and Léontine Frey died (aged nine and five) of yellow fever. Soon after the brother, Frederick, died.
After a couple of decades, after the failure of her businesses and the death of her father, the widow sold Bélizaire to a plantation, which appears in the inventories of that exploitation until 1861, the beginning of the civil war or secession. New Orleans soon fell under the power of the Union Army. There the track of the young black man is lost. So it is still unknown if Bélizaire survived long enough to exist in freedom when slavery was abolished.
His image will be projected from the Met, one of the global museums, which he proposes to investigate to decipher the questions that are still pending.
It will have a prominent place, in contrast to its prolonged double disappearance. The work was in the possession of the Freys until the 1950s, stored in a garage. In 1971, a descendant offered it to her son. It didn't fit him with his modernist decor. He donated it to the New Orleans museum, where today they recognize that they were wrong to despise and keep Bélizaire hidden.
