‘José María Velasco: A view of Mexico’

National Gallery, London, 29 March–17 August 2025

Robin Simon

 

 

 

The illustrations are of works by José María Velasco (1840–1912)

 

1 The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1875. Oil on canvas 157.5 × 226 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City

 

This is the first proper exhibition of the work of José María Velasco (1840–1912) in the UK and the first in the National Gallery to be devoted to a Latin American artist of the period. For anyone unfamiliar with Velasco, and that includes me, this show will come as a glorious revelation. What a painter! He is quite unlike any other landscape artist, perhaps precisely because his subject is Mexican landscape, and in particular the Valley of Mexico, a high-altitude world surrounded by volcanoes. In Velasco’s lifetime, in the pristine atmosphere, it offered views with vertiginous swoops from the heights to impossibly distant plains beneath that create effects hardly to be seen anywhere else or in the work of any other artist (Pl 1, Pl 2). The only comparisons might be with the landscapes of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church or Albert Bierstadt, but they tend to celebrate the lushness of the wilderness and of the atmosphere of the North American interior, in contrast with the rarified air and barer world of Velasco’ 19th-century Mexico. And they don’t at all have Velasco’s sense of de haut en bas that is so distinctive.

 

 

2 The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1877. Oil on canvas 161 × 228.5 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City

 

The Mexican landscape that Velasco painted was itself in the process of rapid change, and his canvases plot the beginnings of the incursion of towns, roads and railroads into an unspoiled world. And of course it also featured the mysterious and haunting remains of an earlier civilization that had once tamed the wilderness that, to borrow Pope’s phrase, had long since ‘reassumed the land’ (Pl 3).

 

 

3 The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, 1878. Oil on canvas 31.4 × 46.2 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Photo RS

 

Velasco was extremely well trained by the Italian painter Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879) at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, but as a polymath he was all the better equipped to chart the evolution of the land before him, being also a botanist and naturalist – having also studied at the medical school near the academy (Pl 4).

 

 

4 Cardón, State of Oaxaca, 1887. Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Photo RS

 

Indeed, before deciding to train as a painter he had studied mathematics, surveying and geology and, when well into his painting career, which brought him international honours, he took time to publish (in 1879) his discovery of a new species of salamander, later renamed in his honour Ambystoma velasci (Pl 5). He identified it in Lake Chalco, which he painted in 1885 (Pl 6): note the steam-train in the middle distance.

 

 

5 Mexican or plateau tiger salamander, Ambystoma velasci

 

 

6 Lake Chalco, 1885. Oil on canvas, 49 × 71.6 cm. National Museum of the Czech Republic, Prague. Photo: Denisa Dimitrovova

 

There is a museum dedicated to Velasco in the capital of the State of Mexico, Toluca de Lerdo.