Tree-lined promenade with a round fountain on the left, riders on the central path and strollers beneath the trees

The Mexico City Alameda

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What you see

Great trees arch their foliage on both sides, leaving open at the center a distant view of a plain and mountains. Below them spreads an earthen clearing: on the left, a round fountain with a single vertical jet and strollers around it; in the middle, riders in wide-brimmed hats and two ladies in white on horseback.

A warm light gilds the treetops and stretches the shadows across the reddish ground. The figures are small, rendered in precise touches, and never steal the leading role from the trees. At lower right, men dressed in white work beside a stream, and on the left a group of women in shawls pauses among the bushes.

About José María Velasco

José María Velasco trained at the Academy of San Carlos under the Italian landscape painter Eugenio Landesio, and painted the Valley of Mexico again and again from the hills around it. He was also a naturalist who studied botany, zoology and geology; in 1879 he published a study of the axolotls of Lake Santa Isabel, a species that now bears his name, Ambystoma velasci. He won medals in Philadelphia (1876) and Paris (1889), was made a knight of the Legion of Honour, and taught perspective and landscape to Diego Rivera.

All 10 works by José María Velasco

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