Vanessa K. Valdés

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...