By James Brewer
He is famed in his homeland for his monumental paintings of the Valley of Mexico. José María Velasco’s rigorously precise yet lyrical works pay homage to the magnificent scenery of the vast land expanse on which Mexico City grew. They were painted mainly in the 19th century during the decades of tremendous social change resulting from rapid industrialisation.
As one of Mexico’s most eminent artists, Velasco showed his work in Europe and the United States, but mainly stayed on national turf, where he still enjoys the same status as do Constable and Turner in the UK. Although he was an inspiring teacher of the great muralist Diego Rivera, who was to champion his cause, he is no longer well-known abroad. There is no painting by Velasco in a UK public collection for instance and the last large-scale exhibition devoted to him outside Mexico was almost 50 years ago, in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in 1976.
The drama and brilliance of the vistas captured by Velasco (1840–1912) have at last been brought to London, by the National Gallery which houses one of the world’s most dazzling collections. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico is the first exhibition in the UK to be devoted solely to Mexico’s most celebrated 19th-century painter. He is seen to be among the great painters of the epoch in which Europe, the Americas, Australia and elsewhere addressed landscape for its intrinsic value rather than as parcelled up in the estates of the gentry.
As industrialisation and the spread of human settlement began to devour the terrain of the valley, Velasco took to preserving on his canvases the surviving breathtaking splendour of the panorama. He sought to convey the essence of its physical and spiritual beauty.
He combines the ardour he brought to the process of painting with his profound interests in botany, geology and Mesoamerican and modern history. He approached drawing and painting not just as an aesthetic exercise, but as part of a quasi-scientific process. This fascinating London exhibition presents 25 of his paintings and three drawings, mostly from private and public Mexican collections. Seventeen are from the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico’s leading public museum.
Landscape comes to the fore for Velasco as a symbol of national identity, supplemented by adroit metaphors of Mexican culture. It represents an indefinable harmony, a dynamic balance that was shifting under the demands of manufacturing and the expansion of housing for the new labour force –harbingers of change that were to lead to today’s megalopolitan capital sprawling across the plain, with 22m people.
There is an insoluble tension in the interaction of these forces at the frontier of change. Velasco illustrates this by incorporating Lilliputian figures of countryfolk pin their ancient pursuits within sight of the new reality. The country hands are dwarfed by the valley itself – it is so vast that one can imagine it populated by giants – and by the totems of modernity: mill, factory and steam locomotive.
At the centre of the exhibition are two commanding panoramic views of the valley, where the volcanoes Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl stand as sentinels of the prospect.
The 1877 rendition of The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, at 161 × 228.5 cm (5.3 by 7.5 ft) was shown in Paris and the United States. In a similar-sized 1875 view of the same panorama, in the foreground against the shadow of a large rock and nopal (prickly pear) cactus swoops an eagle, which with a live snake in its beak is the emblem at the centre of the Mexican national flag. The legend is that the god Huitzilopochtli told the Aztecs to build their capital where they found an eagle and its catch on an island in a large lake. That they did in about 1325. The Aztec word from which Mexico is derived means the place in the centre of the moon, and they called the site the lake of the moon, or Tenochtitlan.
Like Constable, Velasco paid close attention to the formation of clouds, contrasting them with the clear blues of the sky as they mimic the horizon, with warmer colours as they float towards the viewer. Works on paper related to this painting are on display.
The Goatherd of San Ángel, from 1863, is set in part of the expanding urban agglomeration where the river has been dammed to supply a new textile factory. Smoke surges from the factory chimney, while below in microscale, a goatherd tends his flock.
The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla from 1887 again pits industrialisation against the landscape: above the modest structure of the mill, towers a volcano. The picture is loaned by the National Museum of the Czech Republic How did it come to end up in the Prague collection? There is an interesting story behind that. The painting was one of several commissioned directly from Velasco by a Czech-born pharmacist, František Kaška, who had been recruited to the Austrian Volunteer Corps, founded to support Maximilian, who was imposed as ruler of Mexico in 1864 by the occupying French forces under Napoleon III. The reign of Maximilian, younger brother of the Austrian emperor, was brief. In February 1867 Maximilian was chased down and executed by soldiers of the first Indigenous president of Mexico, Benito Juarez, who had led resistance to the French.
Kaška took advantage of an amnesty to stay in the Central American republic and act as an unofficial emissary between Austria-Hungary and Mexico. He returned to his profession of pharmacist and to scientific research, as well as the study of shamanic practices, folk medicine and the history of his new home. He sent artefacts and curios back to Austria and bequeathed his private collections to museums in Prague and Vienna.
We are told of Velasco’s deep and abiding interest in the plant life of Mexico. As an adept botanist and anatomist who published scientific papers, he produced exquisite drawings and paintings such as Cardón, State of Oaxaca, 1887, of a giant cactus overwhelming all around it, both the valley itself and a solitary human figure.
Velasco’s awe before the remains of ancient cultures is apparent in works such as The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, 1878, and The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, 1878.
Among Velasco’s late works is his Great Comet of 1882. This was painted in 1910, when the revolution which ended the rule of the dictator Porfirio Díaz (who was a fan of Velasco) broke out, coinciding with an appearance of Halley’s Comet. Velasco witnessed the 1882 phenomenon which recalled to many the story that Halley’s Comet was visible in 1517 and feared by the Aztec emperor Moctezuma to be an ill omen, and which preceded the ruthless conquest by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés. In the same year he produced in an oil painting on a small card a powerful image of a volcanic eruption.
Visitors are invited to make links between Velasco’s work and paintings in the Gallery’s main collection, particularly Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian. Manet was not present at the execution but read about it in the press.
The exhibition coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UK and Mexico, and indeed with the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the National Gallery.
From an initial concept by artist and independent curator Dexter Dalwood, the exhibition is curated by him and by Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the National Gallery’s Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica associate curator of Spanish Paintings.
Mexico-based Dexter Dalwood said: “José María Velasco’s paintings were able to absorb the tradition and history of European landscape painting while taking the depiction and understanding of the Mexican landscape to a new level of pictorial intelligence.” Daniel Sobrino Ralston added: “This presentation, the first on a Latin American artist at the Gallery, will extend and enhance our understanding of landscape painting during the 19th century.”
The exhibition, organised by the National Gallery and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will be staged further from 27 September 27, 2025, to January 4, 2026, at the Minneapolis institute, where it will be curated by Valéria Piccoli, the Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas and curator of Latin American Art at the institute.
Images (all works by Velasco, except The Execution of Maximilian by Édouard Manet):
Cardón, State of Oaxaca, 1887.Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photo: Francisco Kochen.
Pirámides del sol y de la luna, 1878. Oil on canvas. Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico. © Oliver Santana.
The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla, 1887. Oil on canvas. © The National Museum of the Czech Republic, Prague. Photo: Denisa Dimitrovova.
The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1875. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photo: Francisco Kochen.
The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (detail), 1877.
Curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston with The Goatherd of San Ángel, 1863.
The Goatherd of San Ángel (detail), 1863. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City.
The Great Comet of 1882. Oil on canvas. © Secretaría de Cultura de Veracruz, Colección Museo de Arte del Estado de Veracruz.
Eruption, 1910. Oil on card. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photo: Francisco Kochen.
Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, on display in the National Gallery.
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico is at the National Gallery, London, until August 17, 2025.
