Juan de Pareja, 17th Cent Afro- Hispanic Painter, Velasquez Asst: Met Mus Exhibit, Arturo Schomburg

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Who Was Juan de Pareja, and Why Is He Important? By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, Artnews, June 26, 2023. -Ed.

Who was Juan de Pareja? He was an artist and a Black man who lived first enslaved and then free in 17th-century Seville, Spain. He was the studio assistant to Diego Velázquez and his one-time muse. An ordinary man of his time and a historical curiosity, he has faded in and out of the collective cultural memory for years. For centuries he was known by one myth, which goes something like this: Velázquez, a favorite of King Philip IV, resided in court along with his dutiful slave de Pareja. Unknown to him, Pareja was making paintings in secret.

One day the art-loving king stumbled upon Pareja’s surreptitious labor and demanded that he be freed, declaring that, “The man who had such talent cannot be a slave.”

But what Pareja’s actual life reveals, so far as can be gauged from this vantage point, upends this myth along with some of our most deeply held beliefs about art, its history, & the people who make it. Pareja has been brought back to the public’s attention by an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled “Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter.” The show, co- curated by David Pullins, the museum’s associate curator of European paintings, & Vanessa K. Valdés, professor of Spanish & Portuguese at the City College of New York, not only gathers together Pareja’s work but contextualizes it in his own age, with paintings by Velázquez, works that probably bear the mark of enslaved studio assistants, & other artifacts that clue audiences in to the multiracial & multicultural world that Pareja lived in.

Further, the show, running through July 16, spotlights the work of Arturo Schomburg, a Black historian active during the Harlem Renaissance who wrote extensively about Pareja. It and the attendant catalogue are among the first efforts by a major art institution to seriously map what we do and do not know about Pareja– so far. There is much we do not know, starting with when exactly Pareja was born; the guess is sometime around 1608 in the city of Antequera. We do not know who his parents were, only that his father was specified as deceased by 1650. We do not know if his father was enslaved or free, or whether he was his mother’s enslaver. We do not know if Pareja had a family of his own.

We do not know how or when Pareja ended up enslaved in Velázquez’s studio; the first records linking him to the Velázquez household appear in the mid-1630s.

We do not know his heritage––Pareja’s portraits & self-portraits clearly show a Black man, though a variety of documents describe him not as Black but as Hispano, as Velázquez was referred to as well. (Velázquez, for his part, was not without his racial anxieties, having submitted more than 100 documents in a quest to prove that there was no trace of Jewish or Muslim blood in his lineage, a requirement to be considered for knighthood.) We do not know exactly why Pareja was freed, his manumission document is spelled out in boilerplate language. Velázquez agreed to free Pareja in 1651, but 4 years had to pass before his enslavement actually ended. This lag was standard at the time, though evidence compiled by the Met curators shows that Pareja’s social status changed after the documents were signed. For instance, he was occasionally given his own servant...https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/who-was-juan-de-pareja-and-why-is-he-important-1234672566/
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- ARTURO ALFONSO SCHOMBURG (Jan. 24, 1874 – June 10, 1938), was a historian, writer, collector, & activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the US in 1891, where he researched & raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans & African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, & other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Alfonso_Schomburg

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