This summer, third-year PhD students Clara Pinchbeck and Arielle Suskin were accepted to be part of the American Excavations at Samothrace team. They traveled to Athens and scoped out the Acropolis, found Arielle’s favorite vase fragments in the Acropolis Museum, then landed in Samothrace, land of the ancient sanctuary and many goats.
Cecily Hughes, a second-year doctoral student in the department of Art History and Art studying with Professor Elina Gertsman, was surprised and delighted to learn that a painting she researched and wrote about for a private dealer had just been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” was painted in 1837 and attributed to the painter Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (c.1801-1888). The New York Times ran a short video feature on the acquisition and the painting’s vexed history, a tale of the erasure and rediscovery of a Black enslaved person. While the likeness of a young Black man was featured in the original canvas, it was then painted out, only to be uncovered through later conservation. Now identified as the fifteen-year-old Bélizaire (b.1822–d. after 1860), the sitter was an enslaved domestic purchased by Frederick Frey of New Orleans, Louisiana on 16 February, 1828. Read an excerpt from Cecily’s report by clicking below.