José María Velasco (1840 to 1912) was Mexico’s most famous nineteenth century painter. He was a member of the Mexican Academy of Arts and a professor at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. In the 1870s and ’80s he had works exhibited in the United States and France, where he won awards and medals, being awarded the Legion of Honour by the French. In other words he was celebrated at home and internationally recognised as the premier Mexican artist of his time. He is most famous for his big landscapes, especially his numerous depictions of The Valley of Mexico.
The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel by José María Velasco (1875) Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura . Photo: Francisco Kochen
This smallish but beautifully curated exhibition in the Sunley Rooms at the National Gallery centres around two enormous depictions of the Valley of Mexico but also brings together 28 paintings of all shapes and sizes, along with ten or so sketches and drawings, to give a broader account of Velasco’s career and achievement.
Why a big exhibition of Velasco now? To mark the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Britain and the newly independent Mexico in 1825. The show is also the first ever dedicated to a historical Latin American artist to be held at the National Gallery.
Academic training
Velasco studied at the Academy of San Carlos under the professor of landscape, the Italian painter Eugenio Landesio. For most of his painting career, from the 1860s to the 1890s, he adhered to the traditional style of picturesque landscape. The curators claim that in the 1890s he was influenced by the Impressionists and then developed a late style in the 1900s, but none of this affects his most famous works which are from much earlier.
Flora…
Velasco wasn’t just a painter but a polymath with a deep interest in an impressive range of subjects. He was a founding member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural and took a serious approach to Mexican plant life. In 1869 Velasco devised ‘Flora of the Valley of Mexico’, a short-lived publication for which he made precise illustrations. So, the curators tell us, all of his paintings pay attention to the shapes and leaves and colours of native plant.
To be honest, I didn’t really buy this. For a while I wrote a blog about English wildflowers and on my weekly walks in the country paid microscopic attention to shape and size, the colours and leaves and flowers of a wide variety of wild flower. For a while I worked at Kew Gardens. Among its other treasures, Kew has a gallery devoted to the botanical paintings of Marianne North. Nowhere in Velasco’s studies of plants or broader landscapes did I see anything with this much attention or detail.
The lack of botanical detail is made abundantly clear in what, we are told, is one of his most famous and totemic paintings, of a giant cactus.
Cardón, State of Oaxaca by José María Velasco (1887) Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. Image: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City © Reproduction authorised by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura
Even from a distance this image has a cartoonish simplicity, which isn’t helped by the cartoon figure in a sombrero standing in the shade. But when you go close up you see that, although the vertical ribs of the cactus spines are carefully defined, especially by the way the light falls on some of them, close up there there’s a limit to the detail. You don’t, for example, see any hint of the spikes which are a key feature of cacti.
This demonstrates a general rule I found which is that it doesn’t do to look too closely at Velasco’s paintings. Something similar is true of his depiction of lichen on trees and rocks. It’s impressive that he wants to depict them but when you get in close to the painting you discover they’ve been rendered with surprisingly broad, rough brushstrokes, not at all the kind of detailed academic realism you might have expected.
… and fauna
In 1879 Velasco published a monograph on the axolotl, a type of gilled amphibian found only in the lakes of the Valley of Mexico. Given the curators’ mention of this, and his naturalist interests generally, it’s striking how few animals there are in any of the se 28 paintings. A donkey in one, two little dogs frolicking in the Valley of Mexico painting at the top of this review, and an eagle in his most famous Valley of Mexico work (below) – and that’s about it.
Archaeology
Velasco had a profound interest in Mexico’s archaeological heritage and painted many landscapes featuring remains of the area’s original inhabitants. This culminated in him being appointed as a draughtsman for the Mexican Museo Nacional in 1880. A particularly striking subject which he painted many times were the ancient pyramids and city of Teotihuacán, just 50 kilometres north-east of Mexico City. The show includes three or four studies of this type, the biggest of which is:
The Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon by José María Velasco (1878) © Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico. Photo: Oliver Santana
Once again, if you lean into the painting the detail becomes muzzier. Velasco’s paintings are best seen at a distance. In fact, coming home and reviewing the images on my laptop, I realised they epitomise the phenomenon I noticed reviewing one of the Impressionist shows a few years ago which is that they look much better as reproductions. The valley reproductions are as big as a wall and leaning in you can see the looseness of the brushwork. Reduced to an image 6 inches by 4, it looks absolutely immaculate.
Geology
Velasco by the advances in geology throughout the nineteenth century. His love of geology is clear to see at every level of the paintings, from the snow-capped mountains in the distance to the hills and ridges which break up his large landscapes, all the way through to outsized rocks and boulders in the foreground. The most famous of these and, I think, my favourite work in the exhibition, is of a particularly striking rock or boulder.
Rocks by José María Velasco (1894) Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura
The curators rightly point out that this is framed almost like the portrait of a person. The shades of colouring on the rock and the balance between the patch of light on the grass in the foreground and the grey and white clouds in the sky… I see the appeal of the valley pictures but on this visit, in this exhibition, seeing them in the flesh, I think this rocks picture is his most successful composition,
Also, I suddenly realised it reminded me of Sir Edwin Landseer, famous for his depictions of the rugged Highlands of Scotland and his signature work, Monarch of the Glen. A comparison between Landseer and Velasco immediately highlights the fanatical attention to detail of the Englishman – look at the grasses at the stag’s feet, look at the highlights on its nose and antlers, look at the detail of the fur. In many of the paintings here Velasco never aspired to the same level of finish. Look at the sombrero figure standing under his giant cactus, the smudgy lichen on an old tree or rocks. A loose impression was enough for Velasco most of the time. In this respect, too, the rocks stand out for the beautiful detailing of the grass and its silver seedheads.
Landscape
Back to landscape and the centrepiece and obvious masterwork in the show, ‘View of the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel’.
View of the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel by José María Velasco (1877) Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City © Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Francisco Kochen
This is not only a huge and awesome painting but in a sense draws together all the elements I’ve been analysing. Note the dazzling realism of the rock ridge in the foreground and the trees and scrub growing out of it. There’s a tremendous drama of light and shadow, behind the mound on the left and deep shadow side of the ridge on the right. The more you look for this interplay of light the more you see, like the light reflecting from some of the pads on the cactus tree on the lower left.
Not immediately obvious, there’s also a element of the built environment in the image: in the road which curves round the dark hill and then turns into the long straight avenue across the shallow lake to Mexico City, an almost imperceptible line of tiny buildings the other side of what looks like a lake.
Sooner or later you notice that right down the front, light against the darkest part of the black shadow like a diamond on black felt, there’s a vivid depiction of an eagle flying across the view, creating a sense of space and spontaneity. It’s an extremely professional, technically adept, perfectly composed image.
History and symbolism
In fact the cactus on the left and the eagle in the middle have a symbolic importance. Apparently they reference the founding story of Mexico City, according to Mexica – or Aztec – history. Both feature prominently on Mexico’s flag today.
See the two snow-capped mountains on the left of the horizon? These are the extinct volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztacchihuatl which were characters in a legend about an Aztec princess (Iztacchihuatl or ‘white woman’) and a brave warrior (Popocatepetl or ‘smoking mountain’).
But that’s not all. At the bottom of the smaller of the two hills which the road curves around, is a church commemorating the site where the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared to a native man, Juan Diego, in 1531. The view has multiple historical resonances: ancient Aztec, early Spanish colonial, and contemporary 1870s.
So ‘View of the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel’ is an extremely accomplished example of Velasco’s skill at incorporating all these historical and symbolic references, as well as architectural structures, into a breath-taking landscape. If you weren’t told about it, you’d never guess that this large, tranquil image contains so many references to Mexico’s multi-layered history.
In fact the painting was made specially for the 1878 International Exhibition in Paris where it became known as ‘Mexico 1877’.
All this explains why Velasco was by the later nineteenth century not just Mexico’s premier artist but the creator of images whose complex historical and patriotic symbolism came to represent the young nation to itself and in international expositions.
Comparisons
The show is dominated by the two enormous vistas of the Valley of Mexico, the one featured at the top of this review, from 1875, and the one above, from 1877. It’s an obvious temptation to compare them. In a nutshell I prefer the later one (above), predominantly because it is so light. There is a lot of big blue sky and this is very relaxing to look at. The way the 1875 has much darker shadows around the rocky ridges on the lower right makes the entire image feel darker and a bit ominous. For pure visual pleasure, the lovely airy sunlit version wins.
But the darker 1875 version is spoiled, for me, by the presence of the figures in the foreground, what look like a mother holding a baby, a boy carrying a bundle of sticks, and two frolicking dogs.
Detail of The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel by José María Velasco (1875) Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City
They are, frankly, cheesy. They detract from the grandeur of the scene and turn it into postcard kitsch. It’s interesting to consider that the taste of the time (1870s) required and valued such silly figures. (For a sympathetic explanation of the tradition of incorporating small human figures into vast landscapes which stems from German Romanticism, see the article on Smarthistory.)
It’s precisely the absence of figures, of any human traces at all, which makes the painting of the rocks my favourite image. It is uncompromised by human or even animal presence and so the rocky outcrop dominates the image with a kind of tough purity.
The exhibition contains nearly 30 other images of various subjects and levels of interest (including his most famous late work, of a comet poised dramatically over the Valley of Mexico), but the two big valley paintings and the rocky outcrop are, in my opinion, the only ones really worth paying to see.
Diego
Lastly, after all this highly conventional Victorian Salon art, it is a very great surprise indeed when the curators tell us that one of Velasco’s students at the Academy of San Carlos was none other than Diego Rivera, who has a claim to be the joint most famous twentieth century Mexican artist (probably eclipsed these days by his one-time wife Frida Kahlo). The curators tell us that, despite being associated with the revolutionary avant-garde and then going onto create his famous communist murals, Rivera in fact respected Velasco’s work. He said of it:
“Velasco’s work is greater than a mural painting or a pyramid, it is a poem of colour with mountains as its stanzas.”
Three years after Velasco’s death in 1912, Rivera painted the astonishingly modernist ‘Zapatista landscape’ which, despite its avant-garde angularity and almost complete abstraction, in fact references Velasco’s Valley of Mexico paintings, notably the ridges and mountains, and even the snow-capped volcanoes, on the horizon.
Zapatista Landscape by Diego Rivera (1915)
What a vast, an almost incomprehensible gulf, separates the airy realism of Velasco’s landscapes and Rivera’s wild overthrow of every axiom of the academic tradition in his modernist classic.
Related links
- José María Velasco: A View of Mexico continues at the National Gallery until 17 August 2025
- wall labels
- José María Velasco Wikipedia article
- Negative Guardian review
- Positive Guardian review
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