Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez

Pullins, David, and Vanessa K. Valdés, with essays by Luis Méndez Rodriguez and Erin Kathleen Rowe (2023)

This title is in print.

Publication Details

Description

Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670) has long been a landmark of European art, but this provocative study focuses on its subject: an enslaved man who went on to build his own successful career as an artist. This catalogue—the first scholarly monograph on Pareja—discusses the painter’s ties to the Madrid School of the 1660s and revises our understanding of artistic production during Spain’s Golden Age, with a focus on enslaved artists and artisans. The authors illuminate the highly skilled labor within Seville’s multiracial society; the role of Black saints and confraternities in the promotion of Catholicism among enslaved populations; and early twentieth-century scholar Arturo Schomburg’s project to recover Pareja’s legacy. The book also includes the first illustrated and annotated list of known works attributed to Pareja.

Table of contents

Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments

Introduction: “In Quest of Juan De Pareja”
David Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés

Juan de Pareja: A Biographical Sketch
David Pullins

Enslaved Artisanal Labor in Seventeenth-Century Spain
Luis Méndez Rodríguez

Creating Black Catholics: The Artistic Tools of Conversion
Erin Kathleen Rowe

Arturo Schomburg, Juan de Pareja, and Afro-Hispanic Studies
Vanessa K. Valdés

Reframing the Age of Velázquez
David Pullins
I. Spain’s Multiracial Society and Enslaved Labor
II. Diego Velázquez and Juan de Pareja in Italy

Paintings by Juan de Pareja
David Pullins
I. Firm Attributions
II. Possible Attributions
III. Works Known Only by Text
IV. Reattributions to Other Painters

Notes to the Essays
Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

David Pullins is associate curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Vanessa K. Valdés is associate provost for community engagement at the City University of New York.

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European Art in the 17th–18th Centuries

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David Pullins

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France, 1600–1800 A.D.

Iberian Peninsula, 1600–1800 A.D.

Exhibition

Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter

April 3–July 16, 2023

This exhibition offers an unprecedented look at the life and artistic achievements of seventeenth-century Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670). Largely known today as the subject of The Met’s iconic portrait by Diego Velázquez, Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez’s studio for over two decades before becoming an artist in his own right. This presentation is the first to tell his story and examine the role of enslaved artisanal labor and a multiracial society in the art and material culture of Spain’s so-called “Golden Age.”

Representations of Spain’s Black and Morisco populations in works by Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Velázquez join works that chart the ubiquity of enslaved labor across media, from sculpture to silver. The Met’s portrait, executed by Velázquez in Rome in 1650, is contextualized by his other portraits from this period and the original document whereby Pareja was freed upon return to Madrid. The exhibition culminates in the first gathering of Pareja’s rarely seen paintings, some of enormous scale, which engage with the canons of Western art while reverberating throughout the African diaspora.

Harlem Renaissance collector and scholar Arturo Schomburg was vital to the recovery of Pareja’s work and serves as a thread connecting seventeenth-century Spain with twentieth-century New York, providing a lens through which to view the multiple histories that have been written about Pareja.

Plan Ahead

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