The Baptism of Christ

The date on this canvas is 1667, and it was painted for the sacristy of the Trinitarian convent in Toledo, a Baptism the width of a wall, with crowds along the bank of the Jordan and the sky opening above them. Juan de Pareja was about 60 by then, an independent painter working for religious houses, free since 1654 after roughly 20 years enslaved in the household and workshop of Velázquez. He signed at the lower left, his name and the year worked into the rock as though cut there. The colour owes more to Venice, to Tintoretto and Veronese, than to the sober painting he had grown up inside. The canvas left Toledo in the 19th century, when the Spanish state seized church property and convent pictures were gathered into a museum in Madrid. It belongs to the Prado, and has hung on deposit in Huesca since 1879.