José María Velasco was one of Mexico’s most important and accomplished landscape artists. An academically trained painter who focused exclusively on the landscape of his native country, Velasco is best known today for his extraordinary, panoramic vistas of the Valley of Mexico. During his lifetime the artist won numerous prizes and awards in national and international competitions, and his work is admired for its technical proficiency and almost visionary clarity.

Velasco was born in Temascalcingo, a small town just a few miles northwest of Mexico City. His family were rebozo, or shawl, weavers, and when his father died in 1846, his mother moved the family to Mexico City. A precocious draftsman, Velasco pursued his interest in art from an early age and enrolled in the Art Academy of San Carlos in 1858. He trained with Santiago Rebull, a figure and portrait painter, and Eugenio Landesio, an Italian painter from Turin, who proved most influential in his development. Landesio emphasized the close study of nature, accurate drawing, and the careful representation of landscape topography. Velasco also learned about classical composition, perspective and the use of color. In 1860 one of his first pictures won a prize at the Academy, providing him with a monthly stipend to continue his studies. Additional prizes and awards soon followed, and in 1868 the artist became Professor of Landscape Perspective at the Academy of San Carlos.

Velasco had married in 1859 and would eventually have thirteen children. In 1874 the family moved to La Villa de Guadalupe, on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the artist would reside for the rest of his life. About this time he began an ambitious series of paintings of the Valley of Mexico. These sublime views, pictured from a high vantage point, convey a vivid sense of vast space and depth with a thoroughly convincing atmospheric clarity. Natural details of the landscape are meticulously recorded as the artist celebrates the sheer geological grandeur of this spectacular locale. These paintings are particularly striking, too, for their sense of serenity and timeless calm and their amazing luminosity. 1 One of these depictions of the Valley of Mexico would win an award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Although Velasco would also paint landscape views around Oaxaca, Vera Cruz, and Querétaro, he apparently never painted outside Mexico.

In 1889 the artist visited Paris, when sixty-eight of his paintings were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle. After receiving a first place award, he traveled through England, Germany, Italy, and Spain before returning home. During this trip he also studied Impressionist paintings but concluded that this approach could only be successful if “done with light instead of pigments taken from the rocks and the earth.” 2 In addition to his oil paintings Velasco executed many drawings, some watercolors and a few lithographs. His drawings are particularly fine and feature the indigenous flora of Mexico, rocks, archeological ruins and careful animal studies, as well as preparatory studies for landscape paintings. They are essentially academic in scope and display the artist’s exceptional skill and precision in recording nature’s prodigious detail.

Velasco was a very religious artist with a profound love of nature. His pictures, executed with a loving care and a meticulous attention to detail, seem to express a kind of “Divine Order” that he found in nature. It is even reported that the artist read the Psalms before beginning any important new composition. 3 During the final few years of his life he executed a number of pictures on small canvases and postcards. Often employing invented landscapes these pictures are remarkable in the artist’s use of a small format for suggesting the immensity of the universe. Velasco died in Mexico City.

Paintings by José María Velasco are confined largely to Mexico. They can be found in numerous private collections and in the Museo José María Velasco, Toluca; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City; Museo de Arte del Estado, Orizaba, Veracruz; the Museum of the Vatican, Vatican City, and the National Museum of Prague.


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1 In certain works Velasco achieved his extraordinary luminosity by first covering his bare canvas with gold leaf. See Juan O’Gorman, “Velazco: Painter of Time and Space,” Magazine of Art 36 (October 1943), p. 205.

2 Ibid., p. 203.

3 Howard Clifford, “Note on Velasco’s Paintings” from Jose Maria Velasco 1840-1912 (NY and Philadephia: Brooklyn Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1944), p. 16.