Juan de Pareja

Velázquez painted this portrait in Rome in 1650, during a long Italian journey made largely to buy paintings and sculpture for King Philip IV. He treated it as a trial run before his portrait of Pope Innocent X, wanting to test himself on a difficult likeness first. The man who sat for it, Juan de Pareja, was enslaved in Velázquez's household and worked in the studio grinding colours and preparing canvases; the rules of the day in Spain kept enslaved people out of the painting profession itself. The portrait was shown publicly at the Pantheon in Rome in March 1650, where it drew unusual praise from other artists. In November of the same year Velázquez signed papers in Rome granting Pareja his freedom, to take effect four years later, and Pareja went on to work as a painter in his own right in Madrid. The picture then passed into British private hands, where it stayed for generations. Its sale in London in 1970 set a record as the first painting to fetch more than a million pounds, and it was acquired soon after by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.