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. 

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

The exhibition will present 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' will be 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 will also be 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 will present 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 will also touch 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 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 curators and scholars from the UK, Mexico and the United States.

As well as providing a comprehensive introduction to Velasco’s art, the exhibition will build 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.

More information at nationalgallery.org.uk 

Exhibition supported by

The Monument Trust

And other donors

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

Notes to editors

Press view: Wednesday 26 March 2025

X12231    
José María Velasco    
'The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel'
1877    
Oil on canvas    
161 × 228.5 cm    
Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City    
© Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2024

Publication 
Title: 'José María Velasco: A View of Mexico'
Authors: Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston with contributions by Dawn Ades, María Elena Altamirano Piolle, Pablo Arredondo Vera, Valéria Piccoli and Omar Olivares Sandoval
120 pages, 100 illustrations, 260 × 240 mm, portrait 
Hardback: £25, special Gallery price: £20
Published by National Gallery Global Ltd. Distributed by Yale University Press

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.

Also on display at the National Gallery at the same time:

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 (8 March – 12 June 2025)
The Carracci Cartoons: Myths in the Making (10 April – 6 July 2025)
Millet: Life on the Land (7 August – 19 October 2025)

Twitter @nationalgallery 
Facebook @thenationalgallery 
Instagram @nationalgallery 
YouTube @nationalgallery
TikTok @nationalgallerylondon 
Threads @nationalgallery

Publicity images can be obtained from https://press.nationalgallery.org.uk/ 

For more information

National Gallery Press Office on 020 7747 2865 or email National Gallery Press Office press.external@nationalgallery.org.uk