David Pullins

A provocative study of a freedman painter that recognizes the labour of enslaved artists and artisans in seventeenth-century Spain Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670), his enslaved studio assistant, has long been a landmark of European art. It was painted in 1650, the same year that Velázquez signed papers freeing Pareja, who then built his own...

Reframing long-held assumptions about what distinguishes fine from decorative art, this innovative study explores a mode of making, seeing, and thinking that slices across eighteenth-century visual culture. This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritising production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the...