Painting by Juan de Pareja acquired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art

31 October 2019

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has acquired the work 'The Hound of Saint Dominic' by Juan de Pareja

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has acquired The Hound of Saint Dominic by Juan de Pareja. This recently rediscovered painting is a significant addition to the known work of an artist who spent his early life enslaved, secured his freedom and went on to a career of his own in seventeenth-century Spain. He is best known today from the portrait his master Diego Velázquez painted of him in about 1650.

Pareja was born in Antequera, in the province of Málaga, in 1606, and was of mixed descent. He worked as the enslaved assistant of Velázquez, grinding colours and preparing canvases in the workshop of the king's painter, and it was there that he formed his own ambition to paint. Within months of completing the portrait, Velázquez signed a contract of manumission, and from that point Pareja worked as an independent painter. In a society preoccupied with purity of blood, and hostile to Jews, Muslims, converts and people of mixed descent, that career is a remarkable one.

In the newly discovered canvas the artist's signature is framed by three attributes of Saint Dominic: a small hound with a lit taper in its mouth, a stalk of lilies and a dark sphere. Dominic was a significant figure in the Spanish church, and according to legend his mother dreamed before his birth that she would bear a dog carrying a torch in its mouth, which would "set fire to the whole fabric of the world". In Spanish art the hound accompanies him regularly.