‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met | HO!!!!

“The fact that the boy was covered up,” Jeremy says, “it haunted me. I had to find out where he ended up.” Haunted is the right word, not because a painting is supernatural, but because erasure has an aftersound. Jeremy began to treat the portrait like a missing person. Where had it been.

Who had handled it. Who had decided what belonged in the frame and what did not. He didn’t know yet that this search would eventually end in a museum so large it can feel like a city, or that the price that would echo through the story wouldn’t be a Met acquisition number, but a small, brutal figure from an earlier auction: $6,000. The hinged sentence is this: a nation can spend centuries arguing about memory, and still let the proof slip away for less than the cost of a used car.

The story begins, improbably, with a relative of the white children in the painting, a man named Eugene Grasser, who grew up with the portrait as part of family lore rather than public history. “The family story was that there was a favorite slave they had, and he was painted in the picture,” Eugene says. “And then, for whatever reason, some time later he was painted out. No idea why.” The way he says it—favorite, painted out—reveals how families often carry the past: as a set of inherited phrases, softened at the edges, repeated until they feel normal.

Eugene’s mother, Audrey, inherited the portrait, and for decades she kept it in the garage. Not displayed, not studied, not given pride of place. Just stored, leaning against something else, gathering the kind of quiet grime that tells you an object has outlived its usefulness to the people who own it.

In 1972, she donated it to the New Orleans Museum of Art, what people in New Orleans call NOMA, offering it up as though the museum might do what the family never did: look closely. Audrey told the museum the story about the fourth figure. The museum accepted the painting—and then, instead of hanging it, placed it in storage for 32 years.

“I think that the story of this picture is really a story of institutional neglect,” says Mia L. Bagneris, a professor of art history and Africana studies at Tulane University. She isn’t guessing; she’s looking at documentation, at old photos, at the physical evidence that a museum’s decisions leave behind.

“This is what the work looked like when NOMA acquired it,” she explains. “And you can clearly see the spectral outline of the figure.” The outline wasn’t a crisp silhouette; it was more like a memory pressing through drywall, a presence that wouldn’t fully disappear even when someone tried to make it polite.

John Bullard, who started at NOMA the year after the painting came in, remembers that shadow too. “When it came in, it was not in exhibitable condition,” he says. “And you could see the shadow. But still, it’s not attributed to a particular artist. And the children were not identified.” The museum’s explanation, in other words, was administrative: no name, no sitters, no easy label.

Bagneris pushes back on that logic without raising her voice. “The justification that the museum has given is that we didn’t know who the artist was. We didn’t know who the sitters were,” she says. “Those things are often unknown for images that feature people of African descent and may never be known. And yet, the objects themselves are still worthy of critical scholarship.” The hinged sentence is this: when institutions say “we don’t know,” sometimes what they mean is “we don’t know how to value what we’re seeing.”

Museums, Bullard notes, can’t display everything they own. Storage is part of the system. “There are very few museums that can exhibit everything they own,” he says. “One solution is to go through and decide what might be appropriately de-accessioned and sold.” Deaccessioning is a clean word that can hide messy consequences. In 2004, NOMA sent the painting to be sold at auction. An antiques dealer bought it for $6,000 and had it restored. The missing figure was revealed.

“I think, in hindsight, it was a mistake,” Bullard admits. “Yes, but mistakes happen.” The sentence lands with a kind of grim understatement, because the “mistake” wasn’t a mislabeled vase; it was an object that could have changed scholarship sitting unseen until it left the institution entirely. And once something like that is sold, it doesn’t come with a forwarding address.

Years passed. Jeremy kept looking. He followed paper trails the way genealogists follow census lines, chasing references that were never meant to connect. When he finally acquired the painting in 2021, he brought it back to Louisiana, back to the place whose humid air and layered history seemed baked into the canvas itself.

“I didn’t realize how important it was that I own pieces pertaining to my history until I realized how bad of a job some of these museums were doing,” he says. It isn’t just anger in his voice; it’s a kind of clarity, the realization that if you want something saved, sometimes you cannot assume the savers will do it.

The first thing Jeremy did wasn’t to celebrate. It was to call a conservator. He hired Craig Crawford for a second restoration, not because the first restoration had failed, but because Jeremy wanted the painting as close as possible to the original intention—to remove later decisions that had been layered on like excuses.

The doorbell rang. Craig stepped in with the careful ease of someone who knows he’s walking into an object’s fragile life.

“Hello,” Craig said.

“Hey,” Jeremy replied, then nodded toward the canvas like a person introducing an elder. “We want to get that retouching off.”

Craig studied the surface, the way light caught tiny cracks, the way the background read smoother in places where it shouldn’t. “I would describe my mission as to get the painting as close as one can to the original intention,” he said. “I’m just taking off layers that were added in the past.”

Jeremy watched, thinking about layers in a different sense—layers of family story, layers of institutional decision-making, layers of who gets seen. “I really wanted to find out about the boy of color in particular,” he said. “So, I started talking to Katy Shannon.”

Katy’s work lives where archives and lives overlap. “I specialize in the people that are seemingly lost to history,” she told him. Then she added, almost with a laugh at the audacity of it: “But I’ve never tried to go from a painting backward.”

Jeremy handed her what he had. “I wanted to show you this list,” he said, offering names and lines and relationships, the kind of starting material that looks thin until someone with the right patience makes it thick. Katy traced the Grasser family line back, looking for someone wealthy enough to commission the portrait.

Eventually she found a likely candidate: Coralie D’Aunoy Frey. Then she pulled census records from the 1830s, the kind of documents that flatten lives into categories and numbers—and sometimes, if you’re careful, crack open just enough to reveal a person. The hinged sentence is this: the past is not silent; it just speaks in formats that require a different kind of listening.

“And I thought, Oh my God,” Katy says, remembering the moment the search stopped feeling theoretical. “He’s of mixed race. He is the exact age. And he was a domestic. And I said, I found him. His name was Bélizaire.”

“Bélizaire,” Jeremy repeated, testing the name like a key in a long-stuck lock. Saying it out loud did something the painting alone could not do: it turned a “figure” into someone you could address.

Now that they had a name, Katy could dig deeper. Louisiana property records—dense, meticulous, and, in that era, inclusive of the enslaved as though they were furniture with a paper trail—became her map.

“There are 45 million records here that date back to the 1730s,” she said as she searched. “OK, so here it is.”

Sure enough, the document appeared: Bélizaire’s bill of sale at age six, the record that brought him into the Frey household in the French Quarter. “Bélizaire was sold with his mother, Sally, in 1828,” Katy said. “Frederick Frey was a merchant. And what I found was that Bélizaire accompanied Frey on several voyages. So, clearly, he was a domestic that was close to the head of the house and perhaps the caretaker of the children.”

In the portrait, Bélizaire is about fifteen. The scene is domestic tranquility, the kind of calm that portraiture sells—soft light, composed children, the promise of safety. And yet the truth sits inside the calm like a contradiction you can’t unsee once it’s named. “Here he is seemingly valued as if he were a family member,” Katy says, “and yet could be sold away at any time.” The painting becomes a document of intimacy and inequality in the same frame, a visual paradox that feels painfully American.

After Frederick Frey died, Coralie sold Bélizaire to Evergreen Plantation. It was Christmas Eve, 1856, a date that lands with its own bitter irony—holiday language draped over a transaction that changed a life. And sometime after he was sold, someone painted him out.

Craig’s work at the surface level began to connect to a deeper forensic question: when, exactly, did the cover-up happen? “It was covered up with lighter colors to match the skyline,” Craig explained, pointing to the background area where the paint read too smooth, too resolved. He found remnants of that skyline in the craquelure pattern—those fine cracks that form as paintings expand and contract over decades. The crack network didn’t just show age; it showed sequence.

Over time, Craig explained, the original paint film moves and fractures. “It would have taken fifty years or so to have this level of cracking,” he said. “The cover-up is visible within the craquelure patterns. That would give me the impression that the cover-up happened around the turn of the century.” The pale strip of skyline that once felt like a vague mismatch now became evidence: not just that Bélizaire was erased, but roughly when the erasure was applied.

“Turn-of-the-century New Orleans,” Bagneris says, “you’re talking about a world that had created Jim Crow laws to separate the races, to make it very clear that the two did not belong together.” Whether the decision came from Coralie or descendants, no document spells it out. The paint does what paper won’t: it reveals intent without naming the hand.

Documents show Bélizaire was enslaved at Evergreen up until 1861, the year the Civil War began. What happens next is the hardest kind of historical silence. “Did he survive and live long enough to experience freedom?” Katy asks, and then answers honestly. “We don’t know because the trail stops.” But she doesn’t treat that uncertainty as failure. “But we know his name,” she says. “And we know about his journey. I think that’s incredible.”

Jeremy had been carrying a mission from the moment the covered-up auction image found him: the painting had to end up somewhere it could be seen. “My plan’s to find a permanent home for it,” he said. “The painting has to end up somewhere where it can be seen.” The hinged sentence is this: recovery isn’t complete when an object is found; it’s complete when an audience is no longer prevented from seeing it.

In spring 2023, a dealer representing Jeremy called a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and told her about the painting. The curator didn’t just hear “portrait” and “New Orleans”; she heard the story that had been stitched together by Jeremy’s persistence, Katy’s research, and Craig’s conservation reports.

“I was completely drawn and taken in by the story,” the curator said. “In the past, we weren’t asking all the right questions. We weren’t looking for depictions of enslaved people in a more naturalistic way, as an actual portrait of a person, because we didn’t think they existed. I’d never seen one. They’re incredibly rare.”

The dealer included a full report: the proposed attribution to Jacques Amans, Katy’s documentation tying the boy to Bélizaire, the bill of sale, the property records, Craig’s conservation findings about the skyline cover-up and the craquelure. It wasn’t just a compelling narrative; it was a body of evidence that made institutional movement possible.

“That made it possible for us to move forward,” the curator said.

And so the Met acquired the painting for its permanent collection for an undisclosed sum. The quiet irony is that the number the public can hold onto isn’t what the Met paid; it’s the $6,000 that once let the portrait slip out of museum hands, and the 32 years it spent in storage while its “spectral outline” waited in the dark for someone to take it seriously.

Jeremy doesn’t speak about the acquisition like it’s a personal victory. He speaks about it like a correction, a small reversal of a long trend. “I’m afraid to say that far too many pieces have been de-accessioned or not taken in by these museums,” he says. “And we’ve lost a lot as a result of this sort of negligence. I can’t say how many works there are like the painting of Bélizaire. But I think that everybody should start looking in storage.”

Because the most unsettling part of this story isn’t that Bélizaire was painted out—America has always had methods for that. It’s that the outline remained visible, the pale skyline never fully convincing, and still the painting spent decades unshown, then nearly vanished into the private market for $6,000, and only returned to public view because one person couldn’t stop thinking about a child who had been edited away.

The skyline that once served as camouflage now reads like a scar, and the name Bélizaire—found in the records, spoken aloud, carried into the Met—turns that scar into a lesson: what was erased can be restored, but only if someone is willing to look for the place where the paint doesn’t match the sky.