USA: painting with censored slave figure restored

For a long time, the three children of a wealthy New Orleans family seemed like the only characters in a forgotten painting, attributed to the Frenchman Jacques Amans. The family’s slave, Belizaire, had been erased from the painting, which now hangs on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is the “first naturalistic representation of an enslaved person whose name is known, in the South” of the United States, where slavery was officially abolished in 1865, highlighted the curator of the American art wing of the Museum, Sylvia Yount. . “We do not have another work like it in the collection and it allows us to tell many different, interesting and complex stories,” she declared about the 1837 oil painting that will be exhibited to the public from Thursday. The figure in the background of the young servant, standing with his arms crossed and a gaze presumably lost in thought, had disappeared from the painting commissioned by the father of the family, Frederick Frey, a banker of German origin living in New Orleans. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the Freys died and the painting passed into the hands of their descendants, a layer of paint hid the teenager. “It is possible that the family was not proud to have a slave in a painting, because it meant being seen as a slave family. The other hypothesis is that they did not want a black figure next to their white ancestors,” Sylvia Yount speculated.