José María Velasco: A View of Mexico

The landscapes of the 19th-century painter José María Velasco look serene at first – a vast mountain vista, a monumental giant cactus, rugged hillscapes with cloudless skies. But the artist, who primarily painted the Valley of Mexico, the area that surrounds Mexico City, was well aware of the march of industry in the capital and frequently included textile mills, factories and concrete buildings in his paintings. The National Gallery is hosting the first major exhibition of Velasco’s work to take place outside his home country in five decades (29 March–17 August). The show highlights the beauty of his composistions as well as drawing attention to the way in which Velasco, a polymath with a keen interest in botany and geology, approached painting as an almost scientific process. Since there are no Velasco works in UK public collections, all of the paintings shown here have been loaned specially for the exhibition, but several contemporaneous works from the museum’s collection that have links to Mexico – Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (c. 1867–68), for example – will also be on show.

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The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1877), José María Velasco. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Photo: © Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura

Cardón, State of Oaxaca (1887), José María Velasco. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Photo: © Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2024

The Goatherd of San Ángel (1863), José María Velasco. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Photo: © Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2024

The Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon (1878), José María Velasco. Private collection. Photo: © Oliver Santana