Why was this fêted Mexican painter left out of the canon?

Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a riot of exotic figures by her husband Diego Rivera, or a brightly coloured guitarist by Rufino Tamayo. What you’re unlikely to have in mind is an earthy landscape with a dusty road leading to a nascent city, dotted with hyper-real plant life, and an eagle soaring under a vast, cloudy sky.

This is ‘The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel’ (1877), the finest work by a painter who was a household name in Mexico long before Kahlo, Rivera or Tamayo. And from next week, it and many others of his works will hang in London’s National Gallery, the first historical Latin American artist ever to have been exhibited there. His name was Jose Maria Velasco (1840-1912); and though he was fêted in his native country, in his lifetime and beyond, he has long been forgotten in the wider canon of art history. So it’s at first glance curious, and on further inspection intriguing, that the National Gallery is bringing 30 of his paintings and drawings from Mexico to London. The last time they left the country was for an exhibition in Texas in 1976; and though Velasco’s revered in Mexico, where a whole section of the Museo Nacional de Arte in the capital is devoted to him, there’s no work by him in any UK collection and hardly any work in European galleries.