José María Velasco: Painting a New Nation

The exhibition “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” celebrates one of the greatest 19th-century landscape painters in the Americas. His impressive panoramic views of the Valley of Mexico—home of modern-day Mexico City—are painted with exquisite detail, honoring both the country’s rich historical heritage and the rapid modernization it underwent in the late 1800s.

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel

(Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel), 1875

Oil on canvas

Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City

How many artists have had a salamander and a flower named in their honor? The Ambystoma velasci (Plateau Tiger Salamander) and the Velascoa flowering plant both carry the esteemed Mexican artist José María Velasco’s name.

Velasco was a master of many disciplines. As well as having attained fame and admiration as a painter of monumental landscapes of the Valley of Mexico, he was also a dedicated scientist. While studying painting at San Carlos, Velasco attended a nearby medical school to study mathematics, geology, botany, and zoology.

Orphaned young, he came to Mexico City with family in search of a better life. Velasco was given the opportunity to enroll at the Academy of San Carlos, the first pedagogical artistic institution of the Americas founded in the late eighteenth century by Charles III of Spain. This important school cultivated Romantic and Neoclassical aesthetics and encouraged students to depict the Valley of Mexico.

After the 1821 war of independence (from Spain), dictator López de Santa Anna seized the opportunity to promote landscape imagery to highlight patriotism and to present the new independent nation to the world. Velasco stepped in to become a model for nationalism in his artwork. He took the Romantic ideals of landscape painting that he learned at the Academy a step further by approaching his work with not only the eyes of a trained artist, but also as a knowledgeable scientist.

As a member of the Mexican Society of Natural History, he gained both artistic skill and scientific knowledge by drawing flora and fauna from different geological areas of Mexico. Velasco also included details, such as railroads and urban development, to symbolize the changes that industrialization would bring to the landscape of the Valley of Mexico, where today gigantic Mexico City is situated on a plain surrounded by mountains and volcanoes.

View of the Textile Mill of La Carolina (Puebla)

(Vista de la fábrica de hilados La Carolina [Puebla]),1877

Oil on canvas

Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City

His training and his pride in his country are brought to light in his superlative images of the Valley of Mexico. He created seven versions. These were considered his masterpieces.

One version, “The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1875” from the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, is the centerpiece of the current exhibit at Mia. It traces a journey from the ancient past to Velasco’s time. In the Romantic style, Velasco painted a mother and child with two dogs at the bottom of this grand painting to draw viewers into the expansive panorama and to take them on a winding path through history.

In “The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1877,” also on view at Mia, Velasco began with the ancient by depicting an eagle and a large cactus, an image central to

the founding of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital that eventually became Mexico City. The Aztec god Huitzilopochtli  told the Mexica people to establish their home where they saw an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus devouring a snake. 

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel

(El Valle de México desde el Cerro de Santa Isabel), 1877

Oil on canvas

Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City

Velasco then led viewers’ eyes to the hill of Tepeyac where the Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared to the indigenous peasant Juan Diego and his uncle in early December of 1531.  At the farthest point of the zig zag road lies the burgeoning Mexico City in the artist’s time.

In spite of its almost photographic quality, this monumental painting showed Velasco taking artistic liberties to portray the great moments in Mexican history. It would have been impossible to see Mexico City from that perspective. Nonetheless, his paintings of “The Valley of Mexico” were justly regarded as a celebration of Mexican history and its spiritual roots.

During the autocratic military regime of leader Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911, Velasco’s work was adopted by the state to give the world a majestic view of Mexico. Velasco was named a Commissioner for Fine Arts for the Mexican delegation to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he exhibited seventeen of his own oil paintings. Díaz also took the opportunity to give Velasco’s artwork to Pope Leo XIII and to an American president as well as to other heads of state at the time.

In spite of his international fame, José María Velasco only travelled outside his beloved Mexico twice in his life. He spent most of his career at the Academy of San Carlos where, as student, assistant and full professor, Velasco made a profound impression on the arts and on the generation of artists to come.

With photography and modernism in art, naturalistic landscape painting lost favor by the end of the nineteenth century. It took a precocious twelve-year-old student at San Carlos by the name of Diego Rivera to reawaken a profound admiration for Velasco’s magnificent landscapes that once again take their rightful place in the art world.

Mia’s exhibition that runs September 27 to January 4, 2026 is a rare opportunity to see José María Velasco’s spectacular panoramic views of Mexico. We thank the Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas and curator of Latin American Art  Valéria Píccoli for her efforts in bringing this show to Mia.