Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco was born in the village of San Miguel Temascalcingo in 1840; he lived through three Mexican republics, an empire, a dictatorship, a civil war, the invasion of his country by America and then by France and, in his last two years, 1910-12, a revolution. When Mexico failed to resist American forces in 1847, Mexican jurist Mariano Otero lamented: \u201cMexico did not constitute, nor could it properly call itself, a nation.\u201d Velasco helped the country see itself. Studying geology, zoology, botany and art, he combined them in his life\u2019s work: paintings monumentalising Mexico\u2019s unique topography, flora and fauna. His majestic landscapes \u201cThe Valley of Mexico\u201d became his troubled young nation\u2019s visual emblem.Treasured at home and rarely loaned, 14 canvases plus a handful of works on paper arrive in London from Mexico for the National Gallery\u2019s Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco: A View of Mexico \u2014 its first ever show devoted to a Latin American artist. From Prague come another three, acquired by Czech pharmacist Frantisek Kaska, who accompanied Habsburg Emperor Maximilian\u2019s ill-fated campaign in Mexico and survived. (Maximilian was executed in 1867; Manet\u2019s painting imagining the event hangs in room 41.) Kaska commissioned the luminous floating panorama \u201cLake Chalco\u201d (1885) which opens the show and typifies Velasco\u2019s strange fusion of European-derived academicism, scientific enquiry and Mexican lore and landscape. Chalco sustained rich plant and wildlife \u2014 Velasco wrote an essay on its salamanders \u2014 but it was about to be drained; the painting would be its picturesque memorial. Velasco places the viewer at water level, waves lapping lush vegetation, meticulously rendered leaf by leaf. But we gaze up at two snow-capped peaks, the volcanic cone Popocat\u00e9petl and the humpbacked Iztacc\u00edhuatl. More than mountains, they are legendary characters in a pre-Hispanic tragic love story between an Aztec princess (Iztacc\u00edhuatl, \u201cwhite woman\u201d) and a brave fighter (Popocat\u00e9petl, \u201csmoking mountain\u201d). Velasco unites 19th-century romanticism, ancient romantic myth, and eco-warrior warning of destruction amid industrial expansion. Plumes of smoke unfurl from a train traversing the plain \u2014 change set against the peaks\u2019 eternal presence. The painting\u2019s precise lyricism displays the influence of Velasco\u2019s teacher Eugenio Landesio, an Italian romantic painter who arrived in Mexico in 1855, but Velasco is a fiercer realist, thrilling to the force of nature, and also insistent on including contemporary motifs. These qualities made him the man for Mexico\u2019s nationalist moment, and he brings a refreshing tropical mood to the European bastion of the National Gallery. \u201cThe Forest of Pacho\u201d (1875) plunges you into the jungle, the thick skein of ferns in variegated greens stifling in its horizonless splendour. The giant sculptural cactus \u201cCard\u00f3n, State of Oaxaca\u201d (1887), its spikes dwarfing hills and rivers, and the sharply delineated \u201cThe Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuac\u00e1n\u201d (1878) in faltering evening light have a surrealist enchantment, prefiguring lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, that Cuban Alejo Carpentier thought distinctive to Latin American art. In \u201cRocks\u201d (1894), the intricate surface of a purple outcrop on the hill of Tepeyac confronts us like a severe portrait face.But Velasco can be mystical too: in \u201cThe Great Comet of 1882\u201d, its white tail reflected on a silvery lake dissolving into shadow, distant Mexico City becomes a mere grid of tiny lights, trembling awake at dawn to the blue-grey gradations of a huge sky. This was painted during political unrest in 1910, the comet a metaphor for the coming revolution and instability. It shows Velasco\u2019s alertness to his times even in old age.For, although little known outside Mexico, Velasco\u2019s art is not an isolated phenomenon; he is an intriguing chapter in a story ranging across 19th-century Europe and the Americas: landscape\u2019s triumph over history painting as the genre defining culture and nationhood. The two vast bird\u2019s-eye vistas \u201cThe Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel\u201d unfold distinctive Mexican life over centuries. In the 1875 version, our eye follows the Sierra de Guadalupe Mountains to the town Villa de Guadalupe. Here in 1531 Juan Diego, an indigenous convert, saw a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who became a major Mexican cultural icon \u2014 not coincidentally, the area was associated with pre-Hispanic female deities. In the distance, Velasco delineates the causeway connecting the shore to the Mexica city Tenochtitlan, founded in 1325 in the middle of lake Texcoco and the forerunner of Mexico City; the route was repurposed as the Spanish Calzada de los Misterios, dotted with baroque monuments to the mystery of the rosary. A woman carrying a basket of prickly pears represents indigenous communities. This painting travelled to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia marking American independence; it symbolised Mexico\u2019s.A year later, amid fears of invasion when American troops massed at the border, Velasco painted a more austere, epic representation of the expansive valley cradling Mexico City. The mountains again surge, but instead of human figures, an eagle carrying a bird swoops towards a prickly pear plant; according to Aztec prophecy, a bird of prey alighting on a cactus would determine the site of Tenochtitlan. Velasco recasts ancient symbols as romantic realism, emphasising the painting\u2019s present tense: he wrote that \u201cthe effect of the light in the picture is from one of the first days of June at three o\u2019clock in the afternoon.\u201dVelasco revisited the motif for decades, always faithful to observed reality yet subtly reimagining space to blend imagery of the natural and man-made world into ample harmonies. The crystalline \u201cValley of Mexico from the Molino del Rey\u201d (1895) features the castle where six young naval cadets sacrificed their lives in the 1847 Battle of Chapultepec against America; a colonial-era mill; an agave plant, used to make tequila, asserting tradition; and a smoking chimney demonstrating encroaching industrialisation.Velasco could be more emphatically modern than this; it is unfortunate that his most audacious painting, the train rushing towards the viewer as it crosses \u201cThe Curved Bridge of the Mexican Railway over the Metlac Ravine\u201d (1881) hasn\u2019t travelled. On the evidence here, he seems in European context a throwback, oblivious to the painterly transformations of his contemporaries the French impressionists, sharing rather an aesthetic with earlier academic romantics such as Germany\u2019s Caspar David Friedrich and Norway\u2019s Johan Christian Dahl (both displayed in room 39). The similarities reinforce how romanticism and nationalism marched hand in hand through the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in nations coming into being.When the show moves to Minneapolis in September, however, the conversation will be with Velasco\u2019s direct American peers Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, romancers of the wild west: a contrast between the American sublime, idealising a wilderness ripe for conquest, with scant reference to its Amerindian past, and the layers of history and geography with which Velasco skilfully celebrated Mexico\u2019s resilient mixed identity.National Gallery, London, March 29-August 17, nationalgallery.org.uk; Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 27-January 4 2026, new.artsmia.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco was born in the village of San Miguel Temascalcingo in 1840; he lived through three Mexican republics, an empire, a dictatorship, a civil war, the invasion of his country by America and then by France and, in his last two years,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":253247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-253246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253248,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253246\/revisions\/253248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}