1658, Juan de Pareja, The Flight into Egypt -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Inscribed "Pareja 1658" on the rock at lower left, this is Pareja's earliest known signed and dated canvas. It reveals the artist's developing skill at integrating wide- ranging sources of inspiration, including Spanish paintings, Northern European prints, and the loose paint handling and bright palette of his Madrid School contemporaries. The difference in finish between two episodes in the story - Christ and his family in the foreground versus a distant landscape that includes the massacre they flee - reappears in Pareja's Baptism of Christ (hanging nearby). The exuberant treatment of the angel's clothing anticipates one of the strengths of the artist's later paintings. This was the first work by Pareja to enter a museum in the United States, purchased in the 1920s by circus entrepreneur John Ringling.
1658, Juan de Pareja, The Flight into Egypt -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Inscribed "Pareja 1658" on the rock at lower left, this is Pareja's earliest known signed and dated canvas. It reveals the artist's developing skill at integrating wide- ranging sources of inspiration, including Spanish paintings, Northern European prints, and the loose paint handling and bright palette of his Madrid School contemporaries. The difference in finish between two episodes in the story - Christ and his family in the foreground versus a distant landscape that includes the massacre they flee - reappears in Pareja's Baptism of Christ (hanging nearby). The exuberant treatment of the angel's clothing anticipates one of the strengths of the artist's later paintings. This was the first work by Pareja to enter a museum in the United States, purchased in the 1920s by circus entrepreneur John Ringling.