Juan de Pareja: An Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velazquez

$29.99 at de Young Museum.

A provocative study of a freedman painter that recognizes the labor of enslaved artists and artisans in seventeenth-century Spain.Diego Velázquez’s (1599–1660) portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670), his enslaved studio assistant, has long been a landmark of European art. It was painted in 1650, the same year that Velázquez signed papers freeing Pareja, who then built his own successful career as a painter of religious subjects and portraits. This book—the first monograph on Pareja—revises our…