The Met is Enlightening the Public on Three Fronts with ‘Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter’

By Heloise Pinto

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, ‘Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter’, opened this month. Juan de Pareja’s is a name known amongst art enthusiasts primarily as that of the subject of a 1650 portrait by Diego Velázquez. This portrait has been one of the Met collection’s prize pieces since 1971, where it has attracted sustained interest in its painter. Of its subject, however, the museum has decided far too little attention has been paid; the man in the picture was a fine artist in his own right, whose body of work has, until now, been consistently overlooked and discounted in the study of art history and in art appreciation. Also harmfully neglected in mainstream discourse – especially that of this famous portrait – has been the fact that Juan de Pareja was Diego Velazquez’s slave. 

Diego Velazquez, ‘Juan de Pareja’. Oil on canvas, 1650. Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

This exhibition, which will run until 16th July, aims to throw new and much needed light onto and expand public awareness of the artist’s own body of work, the history of enslavement and the role of multiracial society in artistic production during the period of the Spanish ‘Golden Age’ of painting in the seventeenth century, and the life and work of Arturo Schomburg , the Puerto Rican American historian and collector – active during the Harlem Renaissance – who was responsible for establishing a large part of what is known today about Pareja. 

The exhibition begins with Schomburg and his work in researching and bringing to light the lives and works of African diasporic figures whose enrichment of cultural heritage had, until his time, been ignored or forgotten. Born in 1874, Schomburg amassed a significant collection of Black literature, slave narratives, and diasporic materials which the New York Public Library purchased from him in 1926 using funds from the Carnegie Corporation, and from which the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was created. Schomburg used this money to travel to Spain in the same year, making it his mission to uncover everything he could about Juan de Pareja. According to exhibition co-curator, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York, and author of ‘Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’ (2017), Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés, Schomburg wrote that “he wished Black communities in the United States would know that this man and his artistic excellence is also part of our collective heritage”.  

Inside the Exhibition. Image: Anna-Marie Kellen/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fact of Pareja’s enslavement – the next focus of the exhibition – is not a new discovery, but 20th century scholarship and discourse sometimes concluded in its wrongful denial. This exhibition, however – at the Met, alongside Velázquez’s famous portrait – decisively asserts Pareja’s own identity while acknowledging the role that Velázquez’s enslavement played in the trajectory of his life. It allows viewers to see the portrait in in its true context, along with seventeenth-century art objects made by slaves in Spain and other celebrated works of art from the period which help to explain the reality of the history of artisanal enslavement. 

Three of Pareja’s own paintings, made after his liberation (granted by Velázquez in 1650), are displayed in the final part of the exhibition, demonstrating Pareja’s divergence from Velázquez’s style and development of his own, and giving his artistic output the public attention it has long been denied. Their meeting is rare, with The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661) and The Baptism of Christ (1667) on loan from the Prado in Madrid while the artist’s earliest known surviving work, The Flight Into Egypt (1658) has travelled from the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Florida. The educational benefits of the coming together of all of these carefully curated artefacts and sources can also now be accessed by all; the exhibition catalogue, available for purchase by anyone, is the first scholarly monograph on Juan de Pareja ever published. 

Bibliography

Herndon, Lisa. “Books, Photos & Writings of Arturo Schomburg Featured in Upcoming Exhibition at The Met”. The New York Public Library. 21.3.23. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2023/03/21/books-photos-writings-schomburg-featured-exhibition-met 

Loh, Maria H. “At the Met, Juan de Pareja is Revealed as More Than the Subject of an Iconic Velázquez Portrait”. Art in America. 17.4.23. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/juan-de-pareja-metropolitan-museum-of-art-1234664576/  

Palumbo, Jacqui. “This Once Enslaved 17th Century Artist Was Misunderstood for Centuries. A New Exhibition Rewrites His Story”. CNN Style. 6.4.23. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/juan-de-pareja-met-museum-untold-art-history/index.html  

Rousseau, Theodore. “Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez: An Appreciation of the Portrait”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vo.29, no.10, (June 1971).  

“Arturo A. Schomburg: His Life and Legacy”. New York Public Library. 5.10.20. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2020/10/05/arturo-schomburg-his-life-and-legacy 

“Arturo Alfonso Schomburg”. https://nmaahc.si.edu/latinx/arturo-alfonso-schomburg 

 “Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/juan-de-pareja