Our Featured Painting:
Valley of Mexico from Santa Isabel (Valle de Mexico desde el cerro de Santa Isabel)
by José M. Velasco
José María Velasco is considered Mexico’s premier nineteenth-century academic painter. His vast, sweeping landscapes provided the first native images of Mexico as a modern and peaceful nation. The present work represents Velasco’s greatest subject, the monumental Valley of Mexico, which he sketched, studied, and painted repeatedly throughout his life.

Velasco first painted the view of the Valley of Mexico from the hill of Santa Isabel, located about six miles north of Mexico City, in 1875 (this work is now in the Národní Muzeum, Prague). Two years later he made his most famous work, the monumental Valle de Mexico (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City) from the same viewpoint. Created for the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris, Velasco refined his earlier composition into a more effective nationalistic expression; the foreground is simplified and it sweeps away to suggest the vastness of the land, the panorama is widened to enhance the vista, and the picturesque figures of a peasant mother and son are replaced by the heroic eagle and cactus, the symbols of the founding myth of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital located where Mexico City now stands. According to the legend, the god Huitzilopochtli prophesized that the wandering Mexican people should not settle down until they reach the place where they encounter an eagle hovering above a cactus with a snake in its claws. On reaching the valley, the sign of the eagle appeared the thus the Mexicans founded their city upon a lagoon surrounded by mountains and volcanoes.

According to María Elena Altamirano, the artist’s great granddaughter and the current authority on his work, there are seven known versions of the 1877 composition. The painting at hand appears to be the eighth and possibly last one. The view, as described by Velasco, shows part of the hill of Santa Isabel in the immediate foreground, with the mountain of Guerrero in deep shadow close by. Directly following in the mid-ground are the hills of Atzacoalco and the smaller, farther Tepeyac. Surrounding the latter at its base is the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo with two highways leading to Mexico City, which extends out over to the right. To the left is the Lake of Texcoco. The village of Santa Isabel located on the plain, is obscured behind the mountain of Guerrero and by the aqueduct that takes water to Guadalupe. Far off in the background is the mountain range of Ajusco with the Sierra Nevada and its two famous volcanoes, Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl. Today, Mexico City has spread to cover the whole area, including the lake, which was drained. The luminous atmosphere corresponds to the afternoon light of the months of March or April.

Only a handful of important works by Velasco legally exist outside of Mexico. Purchased in Mexico City and brought to the United States sometime before 1902 by an American industrialist, this painting has remained in one family ever since. In 1943, Velasco’s art was declared national patrimony and the export of his work was restricted.

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