Rome, 1650: A Portrait Judges Its Own Subject
On March 19, 1650, the feast of Saint Joseph, the Congregazione dei Virtuosi held its annual exhibition under the portico of the Pantheon in Rome. Diego Velázquez submitted one canvas: an oil portrait, 32 by 27.5 inches (81.3 by 69.9 cm), of a man named Juan de Pareja. Pareja was present at the exhibition as an attendant, not a participant. He was enslaved.
According to Antonio Palomino’s 1724 biography of Velázquez, a Flemish court painter named Andreas Schmidt reported that painters from several nations judged every other work on the wall to look like a painting, while this one looked like the real thing. The claim comes down secondhand, relayed more than seventy years after the fact, but it has remained a consistent thread in the scholarship.
What gives the anecdote its weight is the arrangement of facts within it. The man whose face had convinced observers that paint could equal flesh was present in that room as an attendant, unnamed on the exhibition wall, with no recognized legal standing of his own.
The 1630s Onward: Enslavement in a Painter’s Studio
Pareja entered the Velázquez household sometime in the 1630s. No transaction document has been located, and whether Velázquez purchased or inherited him remains unresolved. His work was grinding pigments, stretching and priming canvases, preparing varnishes, cleaning brushes, tasks that placed him at the material center of one of Spain’s most prominent painters’ studios.
Born around 1608 in Antequera, in what is now the province of Málaga, Pareja was a man of African descent. The birth year is an estimate; sources range from around 1606 to around 1610. Enslavement meant something specific and material: no independent livelihood, no ability to sell work under his own name, no recognized legal personhood. Proximity to technique was not the same as access to its rewards.
By 1648, Velázquez had been dispatched to Rome by King Philip IV to acquire paintings and sculptural casts for the Alcázar in Madrid. Pareja traveled with him. Palomino records that Velázquez painted the portrait partly as a technical exercise before sitting with Pope Innocent X.
1650–1661: Freedom, and What He Did With It
Nine months after the Pantheon exhibition, Velázquez signed a manumission document in Rome committing to free Pareja within four years, with continued service required during that interval. The document remained unknown to modern scholarship until 1983, when British art historian Jennifer Montagu located it, providing the first firm documentary anchor for the timeline. Pareja gained his full freedom in 1654.
He then built an independent career producing court portraits and religious paintings in a style scholars place closer to the Madrid school than to Velázquez. In 1661, he completed The Calling of Saint Matthew, 7 feet 5 inches by 10 feet 8 inches (225 by 325 cm), now in the Museo Nacional del Prado, and placed a full-length figure of himself at the far left of the composition. Other surviving works include The Flight into Egypt (1658) at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, The Baptism of Christ at the Prado, and a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau from the 1660s at the Museo de Bellas Artes de València. Pareja died in Madrid around 1670.
1926 and 1970–1971: Two Moments When the Portrait Outran the Man
In 1926, historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican scholar and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, sold his collection to the New York Public Library and traveled through Europe seeking evidence of Black subjects and artists in the historical record. He worked in Seville’s Archivo General, examined records of the city’s Cofradía de Negritos, and acquired 185 bibliographical items. He published his findings in 1927 in Crisis magazine, in an essay titled “In Quest of Juan de Pareja.” The scholarship was specific and early, and went largely unacknowledged in the mainstream art-historical literature for decades.
On November 27, 1970, the portrait came up for sale at Christie’s in London, consigned by Jacob Pleydell-Bouverie, the 8th Earl of Radnor, whose family had held it at Longford Castle. The hammer fell at £2,310,000 (equivalent at the time to $5,544,000), making it the first painting ever to sell for more than £1 million at auction. The buyer was acting for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which formally registered the acquisition in 1971. The purchase drew public anger in England over the export; the Met considered it among the most important acquisitions in its history.
2023: The Metropolitan Museum’s First Exhibition on Pareja as an Artist
From April 3 through July 16, 2023, the Met mounted Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, the first major scholarly show dedicated to Pareja as a painter rather than a depicted figure. Co-curated by David Pullins, associate curator of European paintings at the Met, and Vanessa K. Valdés, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at City College of New York, it brought together approximately 40 works: paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, books, and historical documents. Among them were Pareja’s manumission papers. The curators drew directly on Schomburg’s 1927 research, acknowledging a chain of recovery stretching across nearly a century, and stated openly that the show was a beginning, not a resolution.
Gaps, Inventions, and What Remains Missing
Some of what passed for Pareja’s biography was not sourced scholarship. A claim that he died in a duel has been assessed as fabricated. A copper miniature attributed to him has not been physically located. Whether Velázquez purchased or inherited him remains unresolved. Nineteenth-century lithographs of The Calling of Saint Matthew altered his self-portrait to make him appear white, not a gap in the record but an act of falsification within it.
The Calling remains in the Prado. The portrait is at the Met, accession number 1971.86. Pareja painted himself into the public record once, in 1661, and the figure stood there until enough people went looking for it.