JUAN DE PAREJA at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Sarah Cartwright, PhD Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections

An important Spanish painting from The Ringling’s collection, the Flight into Egypt (1658) by Juan de Pareja, is currently on display in the exhibition entitled Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (April 3 to July 16, 2023). The exhibition is the first ever devoted to the life and art of Pareja, who was an enslaved assistant to the painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) before being granted his freedom and going on to pursue a successful career as an independent painter. Aiming not only to showcase Pareja’s artistic achievement, the exhibition will also offer important context for his work, examining enslaved labor in artists’ workshops within Spain’s multiracial society in the seventeenth century.

Though Pareja’s paintings are not well known, his likeness is, thanks to the Metropolitan’s famous portrait of him by Velázquez, painted in 1650 when Pareja accompanied Velázquez to Rome. The exhibition at The Met fulfills The Ringling’s longstanding desire that our Flight into Egypt be shown together with his magnificent portrait. Visitors to The Met will also have the opportunity to compare our Flight into Egypt—Pareja’s earliest signed and dated work—with several other works by him, including his monumental oil on canvas Calling of St. Matthew from the Prado Museum in Madrid, produced a few years later.

We still do not know where or when John Ringling purchased the Flight into Egypt, but there is little doubt that he was aware of the artist’s life as an enslaved assistant to Velázquez, since Pareja’s story was included in a number of the Spanish art books Ringling owned. He displayed the painting in Gallery 12 of the Museum of Art, with the rest of his Spanish collection.

In more recent years, interest in Juan de Pareja’s work has been steadily increasing, bringing greater attention to the Flight into Egypt; in 2019, our painting was included in a large exhibition of Spanish art at the San Diego Museum of Art. The Met’s exhibition will undoubtedly generate even greater awareness and appreciation of Pareja’s artistic achievements, and we are pleased to contribute to the study of this remarkable figure from seventeenth-century Spain.