Juan de Pareja

Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez's household when the portrait was made. The clothing — sober Spanish black, the formal lace-trimmed Walloon collar — is the costume Velázquez himself wore to court. He painted his slave as a gentleman, in his own clothes, with the full dignity of a self-portrait. Four years later, in Rome, he signed the manumission papers. Pareja became a working painter under his own name. Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseum