I, Juan de Pareja
by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
Summary
Juan de Pareja is born enslaved in Seville around 1610 and orphaned as a small child, passing first to a kind mistress and then, after her death, into the household of the great court painter Diego Velazquez, where his work is to grind pigments, stretch canvases, and clean brushes for an artist he is forbidden by Spanish law from ever imitating, since a slave is not permitted to paint. Juan lives close enough to Velazquez's genius to absorb it anyway, teaching himself to paint secretly at night for years, terrified of what discovery might cost him even as his own skill grows. He travels with Velazquez to Italy, watches him prepare to paint Pope Innocent the Tenth, falls in love with a fellow slave named Lolis, and gradually builds a quiet, trusted place inside the household, closer to Velazquez's family than his legal status admits. When his secret finally comes out, Velazquez's response is not punishment but freedom: he signs the documents manumitting Juan and keeps him on afterward as a paid assistant rather than a slave, allowing Juan to marry Lolis once she too is freed. The novel closes not long after Velazquez's death, with Juan an established painter in his own right, working alongside the real Bartolome Esteban Murillo, running his own studio in Seville, the child once forbidden a brush now training students of his own.
Reading it means following an unusually intimate portrait of the Spanish Golden Age from underneath, servants' quarters and studio floors rather than palace halls, narrated in Juan's own calm, observant first person. The pace is gentle and episodic rather than dramatic, closer to a fictionalized biography than a thriller, and it rewards readers curious about art history as much as readers wanting a story of endurance.
Historical Context & Significance
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published I, Juan de Pareja in 1965, and the American Library Association gave Elizabeth Borton de Treviño the 1966 Newbery Medal over three honor books, Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron, Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family, and Mary Stolz's The Noonday Friends. The novel is grounded in a real historical relationship: Diego Velazquez did own an enslaved assistant named Juan de Pareja, did free him formally, and Pareja did go on to a documented career as a painter, work from which survives in major museums today.
Early reception, in School Library Journal, Horn Book Magazine and the New York Times, was largely admiring of its historical detail and warmth. A more skeptical reassessment followed later; the children's literature scholar John Rowe Townsend wrote in 1975 that the novel could be read as suggesting a Black man's advancement depends on being accepted by his former superiors, a critique later readers and teachers have carried into discussions of the book's treatment of race even as its historical core, a real enslaved man who became a celebrated painter, remains verified.