LONDON.- The first monographic exhibition in the UK devoted to José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico’s most celebrated 19th-century painter, is taking place at the National Gallery.

José María Velasco: A View of Mexico, the first-ever exhibition that the National Gallery has dedicated to an historical Latin American artist, coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UK and Mexico.


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The exhibition presents around 30 paintings and drawings, with most from private and public Mexican collections, including 17 from the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, Mexico City), Mexico’s leading public museum.

José María Velasco is famed for his monumental paintings of the Valley of Mexico, the area surrounding Mexico City. Painted during decades of tremendous social change, his precise yet lyrical works depict Mexico’s magnificent scenery and rapid industrialisation.

While Velasco, one of Mexico’s most eminent artists, showed work in Europe and the United States during his lifetime and still enjoys great prominence in his home country, he is no longer as well-known abroad. There is no painting by Velasco in a UK public collection and the last large-scale exhibition devoted to him outside Mexico was held almost 50 years ago in San Antonio and Austin, Texas in 1976.

Velasco received many awards as Mexico’s representative at numerous international exhibitions from the 1870s to the 1890s. He was a painter first, but also a true polymath: a botanist, naturalist and geologist with highly developed interests in both Mesoamerican and modern history. He approached drawing and painting not only in search of beauty, but also as part of a quasi-scientific process, seeking out multiple ways to develop and express empirical knowledge.

Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s career, 'José María Velasco: A View of Mexico' has been divided in six thematic sections that present the artist’s wide-ranging interests and their influence on his art.

Landscape and Industry, with paintings such as 'The Valley of Mexico from the Molino del Rey', 1895 (private collection, Mexico City) and 'The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla', 1887 (National Museum of the Czech Republic) explores the impact of industrialisation on the landscape.

Flora is a section that reveals Velasco’s deep and abiding interest in the plant life of Mexico. As an adept botanist and anatomist who published scientific papers, Velasco produced some exquisite drawings and paintings showing plants such as 'A Rustic Bridge in San Ángel', 1862 (MUNAL, Mexico City) and one of his most iconic works, 'Cardón, State of Oaxaca', 1887 (MUNAL, Mexico City).

The Valley of Mexico, the central section of the exhibition, focuses on Velasco’s greatest painting, 'The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel', 1877 (MUNAL, Mexico City), which was sent to Paris as well as to the United States. Works on paper related to this painting are also being displayed.

The Ruins and Archaeology section explores Velasco’s relationship to the presence of ancient cultures in the Valley of Mexico, with works such as 'The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon', 1878 (Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico City) and 'The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán', 1878 (MUNAL, Mexico City).

Geological Time highlights Velasco’s fascination with Mexico’s mountainous terrain and related geological processes with several works from MUNAL: 'Rocks', 1894 and 'Rocks on the Hill of Atzacoalco', 1874.

The final section of the exhibition presents Velasco’s late works including his very last, 'Study', 1912 (Museo Kaluz, Mexico City).

Visitors will be invited to make links between Velasco’s work and paintings in the Gallery’s collection outside the exhibition, particularly Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–8), which depicts the demise of the Austrian emperor, Maximilian I, imposed on Mexico by the French ruler Napoleon III. These will encourage visitors to consider how 19th-century painters outside Europe explored colonialism, industrialisation and the effects of modernity on the natural world.

The exhibition also touches on broader concerns about the relationship between human beings and the environment, seen through the lens of late 19th-century painters who addressed extraordinary ecological change, a theme that still resonates today.

The catalogue, which is the first-ever monographic study of Velasco published outside Mexico, seeks to build a platform for future research, with critical essays and individual catalogue entries by curators and scholars from the UK, Mexico and the United States.

As well as providing a comprehensive introduction to Velasco’s art, the exhibition builds on the National Gallery’s successful strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to art from beyond Europe and follows exhibitions on Winslow Homer (1836–1910), George Bellows (1882–1925) and the Ashcan painters, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and Australia’s Impressionists.

The exhibition is curated by artist and independent curator Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the National Gallery’s CEEH (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica) Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, from an initial concept by Dexter Dalwood.

Dexter Dalwood says ‘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 says ‘We are thrilled to introduce Velasco to our audiences in an exhibition that includes some of his most celebrated and stunning paintings. An artist and scientist, Velasco was one Mexico’s leading painters, and 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.’

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, London, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presentation of José María Velasco: A View of Mexico, curated by Valéria Piccoli, Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas and curator of Latin American Art at Mia, will be on view from 27 September 2025 to 4 January 2026.


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