José María Velasco: A View of Mexico

29 March – 17 August 2025
Sunley Room
Admission charge

The first monographic exhibition in the UK devoted to José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico’s most celebrated 19th-century painter, will take place at the National Gallery early next year (29 March – 17 August 2025). 

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.

José María 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.

As well as providing a comprehensive introduction to the art of Velasco, the exhibition will build on the National Gallery’s continuing successful strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to non-European art, and follows exhibitions on Winslow Homer, George Bellows and the Ashcan painters, Thomas Cole, and Australia’s Impressionists.

Dexter Dalwood, artist and independent curator, 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, the National Gallery’s CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, 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 nineteenth-century landscape painting.

Curated by Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the National Gallery’s CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, from an initial concept by Dexter Dalwood

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

The Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibition of José María Velasco: A View of Mexico will be on view from 27 September 2025 to 4 January 2026.

More information at nationalgallery.org.uk 

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The Sunley Room exhibition programme is supported by the Bernard Sunley Foundation.

Notes to editors

The National Gallery 

The National Gallery is one of the greatest art galleries in the world. Founded by Parliament in 1824, the Gallery houses the nation’s collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the late 13th to the early 20th century. The collection includes works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Bellini, Cezanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Van Gogh and Velázquez. The Gallery’s key objectives are to care for and enhance the collection and provide the best possible access to visitors. Admission free. 

On 10 May 2024 the National Gallery was 200 years old, and we started our Bicentenary celebration, a year-long festival of art, creativity and imagination, marking two centuries of bringing people and paintings together. 

The Minneapolis Institute of Art

Home to more than 100,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) inspires wonder, spurs creativity, and nourishes the imagination. With extraordinary exhibitions and one of the finest art collections in the country—from all corners of the globe, and from ancient to contemporary—Mia links the past to the present, enables global conversations, and offers an exceptional setting for inspiration.

General admission to Mia is always free. Some special exhibitions have a nominal admission fee.

For more information, call + 1 612 870 3000 or visit artsmia.org

The Bernard Sunley Foundation

The Sunley Room was established at the National Gallery in 1984 and the Foundation has supported the exhibition programme in the Sunley Room every year since 1990. The Bernard Sunley Foundation is a family grant-making foundation which supports charities in England and Wales that deliver a real community focus and provide greater opportunities for the young, the elderly, the disabled and the disadvantaged.

For more information and images

National Gallery Press Office on 020 7747 2865 or email press.external@nationalgallery.org.uk 
Publicity images can be obtained from https://press.nationalgallery.org.uk/