Outside of Mexico, José María Velasco’s artwork is sparsely represented. Prague’s National Gallery owns a couple of his pieces, and there’s a painting from his Valley of Mexico series in the Vatican Museum. And that’s about it. None of his paintings figure in significant British art collections, and the last international Velasco exhibitions were held in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in 1976. Hats off, then, to London’s National Gallery for staging “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico”, a full-blown celebration of the painter’s canon in what is also—slightly surprisingly—the establishment’s first-ever bells-and-whistles treatment of a Latin American artist.
For those unfamiliar, José María Velasco is a Mexican hero. Just how much of a hero? He was born in the country’s Temascalcingo municipality in 1840, and the administrative town’s name was changed from San Miguel Temascalcingo to Temascalcingo de José María Velasco in 1945 in his honor. The town’s Centro Cultural José Martín Velasco is dedicated to his artwork. The Museo del Paisaje José María Velasco is located in Toluca de Lerdo, the capital of the State of Mexico. And the Galería José María Velasco in Mexico City is a public space hosting contemporary Mexican artists. His heroic standing comes down to his being the founder of Mexican nationalism in art, his skill in foregrounding the country’s landscape and the cultural platform he built for later Mexican artists, like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Velasco learned to paint in the mid-1850s at Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos, taught by Eugenio Landesio, an Italian artist well-versed in the European Romantic style (think Caspar David Friedrich’s swoon-inducing landscapes). Velasco was studying botany and geology at the same time, and Landesio helped him transfer his passion for nature onto canvas. By the 1870s, Velasco had begun work on his Valley of Mexico series, painting the highlands on the outer edges of Mexico City. The 1877 series installment, The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, includes two clues to his determination to champion Mexican nationalism. The nopal cactus and golden eagle had featured on the Mexican national flag since 1821, and Velasco added them here, drawing the eye to the bottom of the painting. Painted two years before, another Valley of Mexico painting is a rich exercise in perspective; a wide screen view that swings from bottom right to the snowy mountains in the background. It also works as an example of Velasco’s fascination with geology. The rocky outcrops in the painting are rendered faithfully, but zoom in and Velasco’s light touch becomes apparent. His brushwork is brisk and gestural and not as fiddly as it first appears. This was Velasco’s gift. Here is a painter who didn’t mess around. His wham-bam style melds similarly with his geological interests in the Rocas painting from 1894. Again, the rocks are rendered with Velasco’s faithful flourish, but check out the clouds above. They look like they have been painted by a man in a hurry to catch a bus and are all the better for that.
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In 1876, General Porfirio Díaz staged a military coup in Mexico, overthrowing the government and starting a ruling period of economic growth mixed with harsh authoritarianism. The years of Porfirio’s reign (characterized in history as Mexico’s Porfiriato era) brought industrialization to the country, and Velasco painted the shoots of change. Two paintings, The Goatherd of San Ángel from 1861 and 1863, narrate the appearance of a factory in the landscape. The river next to the factory has been dammed to capture a
Velasco also painted backward looks at Mexico’s socio-cultural history. The Baths of King Nezahualcóyotl represents one corner of an ancient Aztec botanical garden at the site of Texcotzingo, twenty miles outside Mexico City. It was yet another chance for Velasco to exercise his interest in depicting geology, as the bath’s chiseled curves and edges contrast with the crumbly rock outcrop. The pre-Aztec structures built in the ancient city of Teotihuacán grabbed Velasco’s imagination, too. The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán depicts Teotihuacán’s biggest manmade structure, and Velasco chose to paint it from above, giving an eagle’s eye view of the vast landscape around the pyramid. The same pyramid features in The Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, but this time Velasco arrives on foot and the sight of the twin structures reveals itself on the horizon as the undergrowth parts. All three paintings were created in 1878.
Velasco’s enthusiasm for botany is showcased throughout the exhibition. An early work from 1862, A Rustic Bridge in San Ángel, is less about the ridiculously rickety bridge and more about the majesty of the gnarly tree, its arm-like branches cradling the planks. The star of the show in Cardón, State of Oaxaca (painted in 1887) is a humongous cactus. Velasco has included a standing figure in its shade to make clear the sheer size of the thing. The Forest of Pacho from 1875 is a dense thicket of verdancy, and his unfinished study of Mafaffa Leaves is tender and careful.
As Velasco approached the end of his life, his style became looser and more works were left unfinished. Eruption, painted in oil on a blank postcard in 1910, is a messy, smudgy artwork that tilts towards Expressionism. That, incidentally, was the year General Porfirio Díaz’s reign ended and the decade-long Mexican Revolution sprang into life. José María Velasco died two years later. Also painted on a postcard and also unfinished, the story goes that he was working on Study of Clouds on the morning of the day he died.
“José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” works on several levels. His art is ubiquitous in Mexico, appearing on everything from mugs to placemats, and the exhibition illustrates why his paintings are such a source of national pride. Just as importantly, landscape painting can arguably be a bit boring, but Velasco’s work is very much not because he sumptuously communicates his passion for his native environment. Getting onboard with his brash, freewheeling way with paint makes for an absorbing experience. Maybe now, after championing Velasco’s exuberance, the National Gallery will stage more and equally enthralling exhibitions of South America’s rich culture.
“José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” is at the National Gallery in London through August 17, 2025. Beginning in September, the exhibition will be on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 2026.
