José María Velasco: A View of Mexico

José María Velasco (1840–1912) emerged as Mexico’s leading landscape painter during the late nineteenth century as his country underwent sweeping social and industrial change. He was renowned for his monumental depictions of the area surrounding Mexico City, a high-altitude basin ringed by volcanoes called the Valley of Mexico.

His paintings, whether large or small in scale, are intricate visual documents that negotiate the complex interactions between nature, industry and history that shaped modern Mexico. Velasco exhibited in Europe and the United States during his lifetime, but his renown has since faded beyond Mexico’s borders.

José María Velasco: A View of Mexico – which will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in fall 2025 – is the first comprehensive exploration of Velasco’s work in the United Kingdom. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue reconsider Velasco’s achievements, seeking to understand him not just as Mexico’s greatest nineteenth-century painter, but as an innovative modern artist whose scrupulous scientific approach presaged contemporary ecological concerns.

Bio:

Dr Daniel Sobrino Ralston is the CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery and, with Dexter Dalwood, the co-curator of José María Velasco: A View of Mexico. He has published and lectured widely on Spanish art from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, contributing to a recent exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples, Velázquez. Un segno grandioso (2024), and several at the National Gallery, including After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (2023) and Saint Francis of Assisi (2023).

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