Juan de Pareja

Juan de Pareja was born into slavery around 1606 to 1610 in Antequera, near Málaga, in southern Spain, and sources differ on the exact year. He came into the household and workshop of Diego Velázquez, the greatest painter of the Spanish Golden Age, and remained enslaved there for more than twenty years as a studio assistant.

Working in the studio, he learned the craft of painting at close quarters. In 1649 he accompanied Velázquez on his second trip to Italy, where in Rome in 1650 Velázquez painted his portrait. When it was exhibited in the Pantheon on 19 March 1650, it was greeted with acclaim, and Pareja's face became one of the most famous in European art.

Within months of painting the portrait, Velázquez signed the legal document freeing him. Accounts differ on whether the freedom took effect at once or four years later, but Pareja was soon working as an independent painter in Madrid, where he built a career producing religious scenes and portraits for patrons.

His best known work is The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661), now in the Prado, a large painting in which he included a full-length self-portrait at the left edge, holding a slip of paper bearing his name. Other works include The Flight into Egypt (1658) and a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau. Art historians see his self-insertion as a bold assertion of his own identity and talent.

Pareja died in Madrid in 1670. For centuries he was remembered mainly as the subject of Velázquez's portrait, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought in 1970 for nearly $5.5 million, a record at the time. The Harlem Renaissance scholar and collector Arturo Schomburg was vital to recovering his story, a 1983 discovery of his freedom document clarified his life, and in 2023 the Met mounted a landmark exhibition, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter.