Velázquez y el retrato de Juan de Pareja

Elena arrives at the museum before her brother, who will wait at the door. She does not come for a famous painting. She wants a place to sit. She finds no free chair, and a portrait stops her. A man in dark clothes and a white collar looks out at the person in front of the picture. She wants to know who is looking at her. The wall text says he is Juan de Pareja. Diego Velázquez painted this oil-on-canvas portrait in Rome in 1650. In March 1650 it was shown at the Pantheon in Rome. Today it is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Velázquez was born in Seville in 1599, learned to paint there, and at twenty-four settled in Madrid, where he worked for King Philip IV and painted the king and other people at court. In 1649 Pareja traveled to Italy with Velázquez and worked in his studio. At that time he was enslaved by Velázquez. The portrait is from 1650, when Pareja was not yet free. In 1654 he gained his freedom. After that he worked as a painter and made his own pictures. Elena does not know what the man thinks. The painting does not say. She sees the dark clothes, the white collar, and a face that does not look away. Her brother writes from the door to ask if she saw anything. She stays one more minute, then says there was a man in a white collar who looked at her so that she could not leave.