José María Velasco: A View of Mexico
José María Velasco, Vista de la fábrica de hilados La Carolina (Puebla), National Gallery of Prague © National Gallery of Prague / photo by Andrea Rývová
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico, the first ever dedicated to a Latin American artist at the National Gallery, coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UK and Mexico. Velasco is famed for his monumental paintings of the Valle de México, the area surrounding Mexico City, the nation’s capital. Painted during decades of tremendous social change, his precise yet lyrical works depicted Mexico’s magnificent scenery and rapid industrialisation.
While Velasco, as 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 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 in 1976 (in San Antonio and Austin, Texas), almost 50 years ago.
Velasco received many distinctions as Mexico’s representative at numerous international exhibitions in the 1880s and 1890s. But he was much more than just a painter of the nation. A true polymath, he was also 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. His varied paintings explore the relationship between different cultures, ancient and modern, Mexico’s mountainous terrain, flora and fauna, and the impact of industrialisation on the landscape. This exhibition will consider these wide-ranging interests and their influence on his art.
The exhibition will also make links between Velasco’s work and paintings in the Gallery’s collection, particularly Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–8), which depicts the execution of the Austrian ruler imposed on Mexico. These will invite visitors to consider how 19th-century painters beyond Europe explored colonialism, industrialisation, and the effects of modernity on the natural world. The exhibition will also address broader concerns about the relationship between human beings and the environment, seen through the lens of late 19th-century painters that addressed extraordinary ecological change, a theme that still resonates today.
The catalogue, which will be the first-ever monographic study of Velasco published outside Mexico, will seek to build a platform for future research, with critical essays and individual catalogue entries by scholars from Britain, Mexico, and the United States.