This essay was first published in Huntington Verso, the blog of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. We are pleased to republish it here and translate it into Spanish for our readers.

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In the last decade of the 19th century, Mexican artist José María Velasco (1840–1912) painted a small oil sketch of the town of Tacubaya. The quiet scene shows the town (on the viewer’s left) from the south. The prominent domes and towers of Tacubaya’s main church peek through the trees, and a fertile riverbed runs diagonally across the middle of the composition. In the distance, on a rise in front of the mountains, stands Chapultepec Castle, which at the time served as the official residence of the president of Mexico. Today, it is a museum in Mexico City’s famous Bosque de Chapultepec. When Velasco painted the scene, the area around Tacubaya was largely rural, surrounded by open fields and ranchos. Inhabited for more than 2,500 years, this region held deep cultural significance long before the Spanish arrived. Now the area is crowded with buildings within the dense urban sprawl of Mexico City. 

Velasco’s rendering of Tacubaya—a mere 11 inches by 16 1/2 inches in size—must have been small enough to fit in the artist’s portable paint box. It was probably sketched from life in the manner of plein air (outdoor) painting, which was popular in the 19th century and espoused by Velasco’s teacher, the Italian Mexican landscape artist Eugenio Landesio. One can imagine Velasco perched on a small mound of earth observing the scene, focusing his attention not only on the sweeping vista before him but also on the meandering footpaths, small clumps of vegetation, and flowering plants in the foreground. Maguey plants dot the composition, a remnant perhaps not only of the area’s early Spanish haciendas but also of Indigenous agricultural practices and traditions, symbolizing the persistence of Indigenous knowledge despite the landscape’s transformation. By the time he made this sketch, Velasco was already renowned as the most important painter of the Mexican landscape, but he was also a polymath with many other interests. Before he became a professional painter, he had studied zoology and botany and taken courses in surveying, geology, and mathematics.

Velasco’s View of Tacubaya, part of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros’ (CPPC) Traveler Artists Collection, is on loan to The Huntington as part of the installation "Borderlands," which presents landscape painting traditions from across North, Central, and South America in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. When the painting arrived at The Huntington, a few lines of what appeared to be printed text could be seen at the bottom of the work, barely visible beneath the oil paint. With permission from CPPC, Christina O’Connell, the Mary Ann and John Sturgeon Senior Paintings Conservator at The Huntington, imaged the work using infrared reflectography, a process that can detect layers of detail not visible to the naked eye. Each round of imaging revealed ever more amazing details.

I could not believe my eyes when O’Connell first shared the images with me. Hidden beneath the surface along the bottom of the painting are two lengthy blocks of text in Spanish that describe the characteristics of two species of flowering plants. One is a wildflower with bright yellow blooms and broad leaves known as the Roundleaf Monkeyflower (Mimulus glabratus). The other plant, commonly called White Horehound (Marrubium vulgare), is an invasive weed in the mint family. Both species are found commonly in central Mexico where Velasco was painting. The text describes the plants’ genera—Mimulus and Marrubium—and gives detailed descriptions of the leaves and branches of each species.

As it turns out, the pages underneath the painting belong to an unpublished version of La flora del valle de México (The flora of the Valley of Mexico) (1869–70), which Velasco had helped to illustrate. In 1868, he was hired to sketch a variety of Mexican plant species and ended up producing 18 individual lithographic prints, some based on watercolors painted by his wife, María de la Luz Sánchez. While the complete book was never published, examples of the original printed and unbound pages (see below) survive at the Library of the Institute of Biology in Mexico City. The beautifully rendered plants—showing their physical characteristics, stages of flowering, and seed development—are seen as ghostly shadows in the infrared image of Velasco’s View of Tacubaya. Velasco signed the bottom of each printed image, as he did his finished oil sketch.

How Velasco came to use the sheet of paper as the medium for his painting is unknown. Given the size of the composition, he likely painted the oil sketch in the field, using what he might have considered high-quality scrap paper. At some point, the pages were pasted down on canvas and framed into the painting that we see today. Velasco often made field sketches, and he reveled in the details of individual plants, trees, and rocks—beautifully merging art and science during a long career spent in close observation of nature.

Today, art historians see Velasco’s meticulous paintings of his native Mexico as nationalistic images. Unlike the views of Latin America painted by U.S. artists like Martin Johnson Heade and Frederic Edwin Church (see his painting Chimborazo at The Huntington), who often added romantic detail for emotional effect, Velasco’s paintings are typically more straightforward representations from the perspective of a scientist—direct renderings of a landscape with which he was deeply familiar. They are also studies of change. Velasco often included details, such as railroads and urban sprawl, to symbolize the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing landscape of the Valley of Mexico.

While at first Velasco’s View of Tacubaya seems like a static landscape, almost frozen in time, a detail in the middle ground indicates the coming change. Just beneath the view of Chapultepec Castle is a line of smoke above the tree line, where the Valle de México Railroad ran west from Mexico City to Tacubaya and then turned toward San Juan and points farther south.

This rail line brought increased development and allowed greater scientific and geological exploration. By the 1890s, the Mexican railway system was linked up with the Southern Pacific Railroad, which industrialists like Collis Huntington and his nephew Henry E. Huntington were building to open vast areas of the American West, connecting the United States with Mexico and dramatically transforming landscapes on both sides of the border.

Today at The Huntington, scholars use historical documents and works of art to explore the changing nature of the American landscape, botanists and scientists catalog and study rare species of plants, and conservators and curators continue to unlock the mysteries of the collections. I hope that Velasco would be pleased with how art and science have come together at The Huntington to reveal the hidden nature of his remarkable painting.

We thank the CPPC for the very generous loan of Velasco’s 'View of Tacubaya' to The Huntington. For more information regarding the CPPC’s Traveler Artists Collection, please visit the CPPC's website.

Dennis Carr is the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington.