The portrait, showing a man of African descent gazing frankly towards the artist, set the art world abuzz when it was revealed by Diego Velázquez in 1650.
The painting cemented the artist’s stratospheric rise, but the spotlight has been recently cast on the extraordinary trajectory of the man who is the subject of the portrait, Juan de Pareja, who went from being enslaved in Velázquez’s studio for more than two decades to becoming a successful artist in his own right.
This year New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first institution to delve into the life and work of Pareja. As they patched together his story, the curators realised they also needed to shed light on another long-overlooked history – the ubiquity of slave labour when it came to creating the great paintings, sculptures, pottery and ceramics of Spain’s golden age.
“It wasn’t just like here’s this weird case and a mystery biography,” said David Pullins, an associate curator of European paintings at the museum. “It was like he is the ultimate example of an entire system.”
Born around 1608 in southern Spain, Pareja’s mother was likely to have been an enslaved woman and his father a white Spaniard. There was little unusual about his birth. The cities of Andalucía ranked among Europe’s most multiracial and stratified at the time, with an estimated 10-15% of the population enslaved, many of them of north or sub-Saharan African origin.
At the centre of this diverse society was Seville, where Velázquez was based before moving to Madrid. Home to an extensive slave market, it was common to use enslaved people for domestic and artisanal labour. As many as half of the city’s artisanal households are thought to have enslaved at least one person.
It was this widespread presence that explains the role enslaved people played in powering the art and visual culture of the Iberian peninsula at the time, said Pullins.
When it came to Pareja’s story, those behind the exhibit were only able to find “bits and pieces,” he said. “In a strange way, that liberated us to tell a broader story about society … That became totally unnerving in the sense like ‘whoa, we just pulled the carpet out from under the whole story.’ It was kind of great.”
The earliest documentation linking Pareja to Velázquez dates to the mid-1630s. It is not known, however, whether Pareja was bought, inherited or gifted to the painter.
Like other enslaved artisans, he is likely to have carried out tasks similar to those of a young apprentice, such as grinding pigments, priming and stretching canvases, said Luis Méndez Rodríguez, a professor of art history at the University of Seville whose research helped to inform the exhibit.
Guild regulations barred the teaching of artisanal and trade-specific knowledge to enslaved people, but documents suggest many may have turned a blind eye to these rules. The value of an enslaved artisan was directly linked to their skill level, meaning those with a greater mastery of skills such as woodwork, sculpting and silver work could be rented out or sold at premium prices.
An analysis of works by Velázquez suggests that Pareja may have been partially or even fully creating works for the the artist’s studio as early as 1649.
Velázquez’s 1650 trip to Italy, where he revealed the portrait of Pareja, marked a turning point in both of their lives. As Velázquez emerged as one of the feted artists of the time, he signed an agreement to end Pareja’s enslavement after four additional years, paving the way for Pareja to eventually launch his own career.
Centuries later, it is clear that the two men went on to very different fates, with Pareja remaining best known as the subject of Velázquez’s portrait. “People know of Juan de Pareja,” said Méndez Rodriguez. “But they probably don’t know all that was behind his story.”
Free from Velázquez, Pareja embraced a cutting-edge painting style that contrasted sharply with the studio where he had once been enslaved, showcasing lively palettes and crowded scenes. Some of his paintings stretched 3 metres across, suggesting that he may have been supported by wealthy patrons and had studio assistants to help him.
Even so, the Met’s claim of Pareja being a successful artist in his own right was widely interrogated, said Vanessa K Valdés, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York and co-curator of the exhibition.
“They are the sort questions that we don’t ask of those of white European heritage,” she said. “So for example, no one asks where does Velázquez’s genius come from? It’s just attributed to him, right? There is difficulty, still, culturally in doing the same thing when it comes to peoples of African descent. And that’s deeply disheartening.”
This reaction to the exhibition hints at how Pareja’s story has the power to recast both the past and the present, while also highlighting the need to uncover others who have long been invisible.
“There’s so many more, we just don’t know about them,” she said. “And so for me, the richness is in the opportunity to recover and to underscore that all of these societies are so much more rich than we know. There have been so many contributions from so many different peoples.”
