NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE J uan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter is the very good, new exhibition at the Met. It’s topical, revelatory, succinct, smart, and scholarly. Here and there it’s tendentious, but who can argue with eight, possibly ten, paintings by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Philip IV’s court painter, or two wonderful Murillos? At the heart of the show is Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pareja (c. 1608–1670), his assistant, an artist, and his slave until Velázquez freed him fully and finally in 1654. It’s a splendid portrait and part of the Met’s history. When the Met paid $5.5 million for it in 1971, it smashed records for Old Master painting prices.

Velázquez painted only 250 or so works. A busy man, he was the king’s portraitist but also his chief curator and palace decorator. Most of Velázquez’s art is at the Prado. In 1971, and more so now, he’s a rara avis on the art market. And the Pareja portrait, with its muted, harmonious grays and blacks, its subject both bold and composed, is Velázquez at his peak in the genre of intimate portraiture. The Met’s purchase of the picture was a sensation for its price, rarity, and quality. Fresh meat, it had lived in the Earl of Radnor’s country house in Wiltshire since around 1814.

Juan de Pareja does a few things and does them with precision and verve. It gives the portrait — and Velázquez — a fresh look. That’s a tough task. The portrait, though not of an aristocrat and not a commission, was famous from the time Velázquez first showed it in Rome, in 1650. Rome then was the center of the art world, in contrast to staid Madrid. Velázquez wasn’t well known, since almost all of his work stayed in Philip IV’s palaces. The Pareja portrait was, for him, a triumph before a tough, sophisticated crowd, and it led to his Portrait of Innocent X and nearly a dozen other Vatican luminaries. The curators found new nuggets.

They also clear lots of the fog around Pareja’s own production as an artist. That’s a service, though I agree with Met curator Everett Fahy’s assessment of Pareja — a mediocrity — when the museum bought the picture. The show examines slavery in Spain, especially in Seville, where Velázquez was born and where he lived and worked until he moved to Madrid to work for the king. The exhibition develops — the best it can — the portrait’s place in the Harlem Renaissance. I learned a lot.

We don’t know when and how Pareja came to be owned by Velázquez, but the curators tell us that by the mid 1630s Pareja’s name appears in documents related to the then-rising court painter. We think Pareja was born in Antequera, a small city between Seville and Málaga, around 1608. That’s speculative, though. The date is based on a biographical survey of Spanish artists published by Antonio Palomino in the 1710s. Palomino, whose book has a long passage on Pareja, tells us he was in his early 60s when he died.

I’ll start with a primer on Velázquez, since Juan de Pareja, at its best, is really a Velázquez show. Born to parents of modest means, he was precocious enough to land as an apprentice in the studio of Francisco Pacheco in 1610 or so. He learned to paint in the dark, crisp style of Sevillian painting, which itself blended the tenebrism of Caravaggio, already an international rage, with the lifelike look of Spanish polychrome sculpture. Velázquez’s early work was mostly still lifes and scenes of everyday life, such as Old Woman Selling Eggs, from around 1620.

Velázquez came to the attention of the young Philip IV through the Count-Duke of Olivares, his prime minister. He’d already married Pacheco’s daughter, and his new father-in-law was no slouch at networking. When Velázquez got a job as a court painter, he absorbed the king’s magnificent collection of Venetian painting. Velázquez’s art went from dark and austere to rich colors applied in strokes of paint in sparkling dabs. Peter Paul Rubens, by the late 1620s a famous painter but also a Flemish diplomat, mentored Velázquez while he was posted to Madrid.

In 1629, Philip sent Velázquez to Italy to buy art and to learn Italian style by immersion. In Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), The Surrender of Breda, and dozens of royal portraits in the 1630s and ’40s, Velázquez created an iconography of power, grandeur, and succulence.

Philip sent Velázquez back to Italy in 1649 for more art-shopping. Over about a year, the artist traveled from Venice to Naples, with stops in all the art hubs but especially Rome. Pareja joined him. Spanish artists, we learn, often had slaves. Mostly, they did mechanical tasks such as grinding colors, stretching canvases, applying grounds and varnishes, and hauling things around. Pareja probably learned to paint during his years with Velázquez in Madrid but over months in Italy became the artist’s all-around assistant, body man, cohort, and, finally, subject.

Velázquez displayed the Pareja portrait at an art fair in the Pantheon in 1650 and was among its shining stars. “In the opinion of all the artists of different nations, everything else looked like painting, but this looked like truth,” one contemporary artist said. Velázquez, some think, painted Pareja as a warm-up exercise in preparation for his Portrait of Innocent X, a grander picture, to be sure, but as unflinching.

After Velázquez painted Pareja’s portrait, he sent Pareja and his portrait to the homes of artists in Rome and, here and there, the rich and well-connected, according to Palomino. Velázquez was no hayseed. He wasn’t famous in Rome but came as an agent of Philip IV, then ruler of an empire bigger than Rome’s ever was. He was a master image-maker, and through the Pareja portrait he worked to market his own.

When showing Pareja and his portrait side by side, Velázquez heard words of wonder. Pareja lived and breathed, but the portrait evoked truth as well as the affection and empathy Velázquez felt for his servant, his slave, and, on an extended road trip, with formalities relaxed, his companion. I’m not surprised that Velázquez signed Pareja’s manumission papers in Rome.

By Spanish law, it took four years for Velázquez’s declaration to take effect. No one knows for certain, but during this period Pareja might have been more of an aide-de-camp and less a piece of chattel. Velázquez painted Las Meninas, The Fable of Arachne, and shimmering portraits of the king’s young children. He died in 1660.

The Pareja portrait isn’t flashy, like something by Hals. Even Velázquez’s most sparkling surfaces, like the dresses of his infantas, are precisely measured. Pareja’s eyes are each a couple of dabs of paint, but what deliberative dabs. Velázquez moves through instinctive, subtle shades of gray and of browns for Pareja’s face, and black for his frizzy hair, both set off by a white lace collar. It’s formal and informal. Pareja is distant but direct, even curious. He wears a lace collar but has a hole in his sleeve.

The exhibition starts not with Velázquez but with Arturo Schomburg (1874–1938). I knew of Schomburg as the historian and collector who sold his books, manuscripts, and ephemera concerning the African diaspora to the Carnegie Corporation in 1926, which gave it to the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. It became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and, today, has about 11 million objects.

Schomburg’s part in the Harlem Renaissance was lifelong and esoteric. He was born in Puerto Rico while it was among the remnants of the Spanish empire. His mother was a free black woman while his white father belonged to a family of German émigrés. Moved in childhood by a teacher’s view that “the Negro has no history,” Schomburg decided he’d find one, which took him eventually to Spain. Along with Portugal and native warlords in Africa, Spain first brought African slavery to the New World.

The exhibition has good material on Schomburg’s 1926 trip to Spain to research records of slavery in Spain’s New World colonies archived in Sevillian libraries, but his sojourn became a Pareja-driven inquiry. In 1923, Schomburg delivered a scholarly speech on Pareja as Spain’s best artist of African descent. Velázquez’s Pareja portrait spawned lots of copies, one of which had already landed in the Hispanic Society in the northern reaches of Harlem. Schomburg knew the image and knew the depiction of Pareja in Velázquez literature as the artist’s slave and, once freed, an artist who made a career for himself.

The concept of a search, especially one to find lost history, is an appealing, titillating one. I’m not sure it works here. Schomburg wrote a couple of articles about his trip to Spain, but I don’t see them as scholarly. They’re more touristical or popular history. After his 1926 trip, Schomburg never hounded the Pareja trail, or even the trail from Spain to the slave trade. In looking for black history, he found more fruitful and logical topics.

The Met, as a Manhattan institution, can’t help being at least a little disingenuous. “Afro-Hispanic” is a weasel word, much as “white Hispanic” was invented by the New York Times to fashion George Zimmerman as a racist in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s death. Pareja was, more precisely, a Morisco, or of Moorish heritage. An Islamic caliphate controlled almost all of Spain by the 720s. In 1492, a war of Roman Catholic liberation that had lasted 770 years finally booted the Moors from their last redoubt in Granada.

Is Pareja to be considered part African? Well, the Maghreb, the African portion of the caliphate that ruled Spain, stretched from Libya to Morocco, but it isn’t sub-Saharan. Morisco purges commonly happened as the Reconquista progressed and, now and then, after 1492, most notably in 1609. Moriscos were well down the social hierarchy and often landed among the ranks of slaves. Slavery, though common in Spain, was an urban phenomenon existing mostly in affluent homes and in artist studios.

Pareja’s skin was indeed dark, but race in southern Spain was a tricky, porous thing. Pareja might have once been a slave, but he considered himself very Spanish and very Catholic. This wasn’t a disguise as it was for many Spanish Jews. Pareja, once a free man, fully assimilated into Spanish identity. This evolution might have dated to the time of his white father. As the slave of the refined Velázquez and living, even below stairs, in royal palaces, Pareja absorbed Spanishness by osmosis. I don’t think he saw himself as a former slave.

Juan de Pareja tucks these issues toward the back of the catalogue but foregrounds them in the exhibition. This is a mistake. So are repeated, fanboy quotes by Schomburg, who, on the subject of Spanish Golden Age art, is out of his depth.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s Battle between Christians and Muslims at El Sotillo, from the late 1630s and in the Met’s collection, gives the exhibition an aesthetic and intellectual jolt. It depicts a Roman Catholic miracle from 1370, when Mary, Jesus’s mother, cast a glaring spotlight from Heaven on Moorish troops launching an ambush against Christian troops during the Reconquista. Zurbarán’s picture was the centerpiece of a 50-foot-tall altarpiece. The Reconquista, like our Revolution, defined a country of disparate parts that are still, today, uneasily united. Anti-Islamic feeling in Europe was still strident in the lifetime of Zurbarán, Pareja, and Velázquez. The last Islamic invasion of Europe — the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna — was a near-run thing.

There’s a good section on Spanish lusterware, which I love, and Spanish silver. Lusterware might have started with the Moorish occupation of Spain but, after 1492, it continued to be made, often of Islamic design and with Christian text and images on the same piece. During the colonial era, silversmiths in Spain often used metal from Potosí in Bolivia and mined by slaves. The lusterware and silver dish, ewer, and tazza on view are from the Met’s collection. I’m happy they’re getting gallery time, but we’ve wandered very far from Pareja at this point.

Three versions of The Kitchen Maid, two definitely by Velázquez and one attributed to him, have a place of pride. They’re from 1618, done in Seville when Velázquez was still a teenager. They’ve never been displayed together, and, the exhibition tells us, the scene’s a first. A person of color had never been used as the central protagonist in a painting, though we can’t know that for sure. The kitchen maid in one version pauses from her work to listen to Jesus in the next room having supper at Emmaus after the Resurrection.

The picture’s theme — Jesus’s message is for rich and poor, leisured and slaving alike — is a sound one. I loved seeing Murillo’s Three Boys, from around 1670, and his Marriage Feast at Cana, from 1672. Both are fantastic, and both came from U.K. museums, so they’ve traveled far for little, but they seem to have been made peripheral. In Three Boys, a black boy, standing, well dressed, and holding a pie, seems about to be mugged by two ratty white boys. Murillo, we learn, owned six slaves, one of whom was white and another who was described as “Berber” in documents from Murillo’s day. What’s the deal? There’s so much happening in this scene.

The Marriage Feast at Cana is a multi-figured extravaganza. One of the figures is black. I can’t say “so what,” but we need to know more about why it’s in the Pareja show, aside from the Met’s borrowing power. Both of these pictures were painted 20 years after the Velázquez portrait of Pareja. Murillo lived in Seville, but we already know lots of Sevillian artists owned slaves. Why is it in the show?

The show’s stars are next. The Pareja portrait, a small version of Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, his portrait of Cardinal Camilo Astalli, the pope’s nephew, and a portrait of Juan de Córdoba, who arranged Velázquez’s and Pareja’s Italian logistics, are magnificently grouped. All from 1650, they’re niche works for Velázquez in that they’re Roman and not formal depictions of Spanish royals. Velázquez certainly enjoyed his time in Italy, which he must have considered, at least in part, as a sabbatical where he could think new thoughts.

He was experimental, too. I’d link his Rome work to his paintings of dwarves and jesters in Philip IV’s court for their intimacy, frankness, and free handling of paint. These are from the late 1630s into the mid ’40s. They’re different, though. Velázquez liked the compositional challenge since the dwarves, especially, had so many physical deformities, with most sitting on the floor. He experimented with space, too, most famously in his portrait of Pablo de Valladolid from 1635, where the figure floats against a sea of tonal beige.

The Astalli portrait is a lovely tonal picture based on reds and whites. For Innocent X, Velázquez let his reds go wild and run from maroon and crimson to pink, and then there’s the pope’s ruddy face. The Habsburgs, in addition to having long chins, were a pasty people. The pope’s mantel and cap, both red, are made from dabs of different reds and golds. Pareja’s portrait conveys dignity while Innocent is after power. It’s good to see them together.

A section on Pareja’s own work ends the exhibition. He’s a competent but derivative artist, derivative not so much of Velázquez but of the generation of artists after him such as Claudio Coello. The Calling of St. Matthew, a multi-figured, ten-foot-wide painting, is crisp and clear, like an illustration. The exhibition makes much of Pareja’s inclusion of his self-portrait prominently at the left edge of the painting. He presents himself, more or less, as a white man in fancy dress. He wasn’t one to look back.

Ending with Pareja’s art after so many great pictures by Velázquez and Murillo is like traveling on the Queen Mary to Southampton one week and the SS Minnow to Gilligan’s Island the next.

Juan de Pareja would have done better to confine Schomburg to a small, contained part of the show since he’s a very tangential part of Pareja’s story, if he’s more than a coda. The exhibition did make me look forward to a visit to the Schomburg Center to write about its good work.