Wily Amphibian; Velasco, between Art and Science

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, Museo Nacional De Arte

Wily Amphibian; Velasco, between Art and Science

José María Velasco, A View of Mexico, Dexter Dalwood & Daniel Sobrino Ralston, Yale University Press, Catalogue of the Exhibition at the National Gallery, 29 March-17 August 2025, reviewed by Leslie Jones

The 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibition entitled Art in Latin America; The Modern Era, 1820-1980, curated by Dawn Adès, included several landscapes by José Mariá Velasco. This, however, is the UK’s first “in depth exploration of Velasco’s work”, indeed, the “first ever [exhibition] dedicated to a Latin American artist at the National Gallery”.

Velasco was born in 1840 in San Miguel Temascalcingo but his family moved to Mexico City in 1850, in search of work. He already evinced a penchant for drawing at primary school. Subsequently, having completed a three-year, night-school drawing class at the Academia de San Carlos, he enrolled in January 1858 as a full-time student, specialising in landscape painting (see ‘Master of the Far Horizon’, Catalogue, MEA Piolle). The Academia sought to emulate the European art schools, in particular the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid (vide D S Ralston,‘Velasco Beyond Mexico’). His teacher was the Italian artist Eugenio Landesio, director of the landscape painting department. Velasco was Landesio’s star pupil and in 1873 succeeded him as lecturer in landscape art at the Academia.

Landesio once worked in the Rome studio of landscape artist Károly Markó, an admirer of Poussin and Claude Lorrain. His modus operandi was to make pencil drawings and oil sketches out of doors then elaborate the composition in the studio. His teaching methods exerted a powerful influence on Velasco. A Rustic Bridge in San Angel (1862) echoes Landesio’s Trunk of a Holm Oak (1844). Ralston contends that Landesio imbued Velasco’s work with “a distinctly European sensibility” (Ralston, p26).

Apropos European influences, several of Velasco’s patrons, notably the chemist František Kaska, were former members of the entourage of the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian, executed in 1867. Emperor Maximilian himself reportedly admired both Landesio and his protégé. Kaska eventually owned eight of Velasco’s canvases which he then bequeathed to the Czech National Museum in Prague. Although a self-styled Mexican patriot, Velasco was happy to accept the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph for The Hill of the Bells (1902). It features a chapel built on the site of Maximilian’s execution. Maximilian was the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph 1.

Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet (about 1867-8) credit Wikipedia

For Professor Adès, Velasco’s attention to detail brings to mind John Ruskin’s precept of truth to nature. Like Ruskin, he “eschewed picturesque, theatrical and ideal landscape models…” (preface to Catalogue, p10). Before graduating in 1868, he studied natural sciences at the Escuela Nacional de Medecine, thereby giving his depictions of the natural world “a sound scientific underpinning”. In due course, he was a founding member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Naturel.

The Baths at Nezahualcó (1878), Museo Nacional De Arte, Inbal, Mexico City

From 1880-1892, Velasco was the official draughtsman of the Museo Nacional. His brief was to produce illustrations of ancient monuments etc for the museum’s journal Anales. In 1878 he accompanied an expedition to the archaeological site of Texcotzingo. The baths at Nezahualcoyotl were built at the behest of the ruler of Texcoco. In The Baths of Nezahualcóyotl (1878) Velasco highlighted the hydraulic engineering skills of its fifteenth century builders. According to the Catalogue (p82), the painting “showcases Velasco’s ongoing dedication to the intertwining of nature, science and history”. In similar vein, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, a monumental temple complex constructed between AD 100 and AD 450 at the city of Teotihuacan, were depicted in two works by Velasco, dated 1878.

Dexter Dalwood characterises the Mexican landscape as a “site of change” (p51). The dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, from 1876 to 1911, witnessed the “onrush of industrial modernity”. The Porfirian project was technocratic. Economic development was viewed as a panacea for most social ills. Velasco implicitly endorsed the project by highlighting the advent of factories and trains in several of his paintings.

Porfirio Diaz, credit Wikipedia

An in-depth knowledge of geology was displayed in Velasco’s detailed studies of rock outcrops. They were so accurate that the engineer and botanist Mariano de la Bárcena used them in lectures to illustrate the formation of the Valley of Mexico.

Velasco, Rocas, credit Wikipedia

But how did Velasco reconcile his Catholicism with his increasing awareness of the age of the earth? In The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1875), we see the hill of Tepeyac, with the town Villa de Guadalupe at its base. It was at Tepeyac, in 1851, that the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom Velasco was devoted, supposedly appeared to a convert to Christianity, one Juan Diego.

According to D S Ralston, The Great Comet of 1882 (painted in 1910, from an on-site sketch made in 1882) bespeaks Velasco’s “astute understanding of contemporary Mexican politics”. Comets were reputed to presage civil strife and 1910 saw the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution. This painting, we are informed, is “a haunting late masterpiece” and has a “portentous even mystical quality”. But then the mystic and the prophetic, like beauty, are mostly in the eye of the beholder.

Velasco was a painstaking and technically accomplished landscape artist. But his oeuvre arguably lacks the timeless and transcendent quality of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review