Juan de Pareja

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 successful career as a painter of religious subjects and portraits. This book—the first monograph on Pareja—revises our understanding of artistic production during Spain’s Golden Age and discusses Pareja’s ties to both Velázquez and the Madrid School of the 1660s.

Highlighted works include Pareja’s monumental Calling of Saint Matthew (1661); Velázquez’s portraits produced in Rome shortly after Juan de Pareja (1650); and the manumission document granting Pareja his freedom.

The essays focus on highly skilled, enslaved artisanal labour within Seville’s multiracial society; the role of Black saints and confraternities in the promotion of Catholicism in enslaved populations; and early twentieth-century scholar Arturo Schomburg’s project to recover Pareja’s legacy. The book also includes an illustrated and annotated list of known works attributed to Pareja.