Juan Correa was born in 1646, in Mexico City, New Spain. His father, also known as Juan Correa, was a famous barber-surgeon of the Spanish Inquisition, a native of Mexico City, himself the son of a Spaniard whose mother was a native of Cádiz, Spain, probably a mulatta or a Christianized Moor, although there are at present no documents to confirm this. His mother was a free black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, who had already given birth to two children in an illegitimate union by the time she got married to the doctor, by whom she had two sons, José, a master gilder, and Juan Correa himself.  
Correa's artistic output was generally founded on religious themes, and in many instances were copies of European pieces, as was the custom at that time. Acknowledged and appreciated by New Hispanic society of the day, Correa churned out important, heterogeneous and numerous pictorial works in the final quarter of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century on the order of individuals and civil and ecclesiastical authorities. His production touches on all the iconography of the period: the subjects of archangels, Marian devotions, Christological themes, allegories, male and female saints, souls from purgatory, and even screen partitions bearing humanistic themes. Catering to the localized interests of New Spain, keen to highlight certain themes related to evangelical mission work, the didactic passages and American prayers, among them presumably the one to the Virgin of Guadeloupe, it is to Correa that we owe the first copy of the image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, of whom the mulatto painter was a devotee, and a particular promoter of her culture. Throughout his life as a master, Juan Correa took several mulatto apprentices into his studio and trained important future New Spanish painters, including José de Ibarra (Velázquez, 1998).