For a long time, the three children of a well-to-do New Orleans household seemed to be the only characters in a forgotten painting attributed to the Frenchman Jacques Amans. The family's slave, Bélizaire, had been erased from the painting, which now hangs in New York's prestigious Metropolitan Museum. The unique piece is the museum's "first naturalistic representation of a named enslaved individual pictured in a Southern setting" explains the American Wing curator, Sylvia Yount. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES