Juan de Pareja
Juan de Pareja was a Spanish painter born around 1606 in Antequera, southern Spain. He was born into slavery but became part of the household and workshop of the famous painter Diego Velázquez, who freed him in 1650.
Pareja is best known for his own painting, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661), which is at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Very little is known about his early life. Some sources say he was a morisco (a Muslim convert) and of mixed heritage. The first clear reference to him as a painter is a 1630 letter asking permission to move to Madrid to study, possibly with his brother Jusepe. We don’t know exactly when he started working for Velázquez.
He appears in several legal documents as a witness for Velázquez in the 1640s and 1650s. In 1649 he traveled with Velázquez to Italy. While in Rome, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pareja, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. On November 23, 1650, Velázquez gave Pareja a letter of freedom, which would take effect four years later if he stayed lawful and did not run away. The manumission document is held in Rome.
After gaining his freedom, Pareja worked as an independent painter in Madrid until his death around 1670. He brought knowledge from Velázquez’s workshop and from other Spanish and Italian painters to his own work.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:54 (CET).