José María Tranquilino Francisco de Jesús Velasco Gómez Obregón, generally known as José María Velasco, (Temascalcingo, 6 July 1840 – Estado de México, 26 August 1912) was a 19th-century Mexican polymath, most famous as a painter who made Mexican geography a symbol of national identity through his paintings.

[4] Velasco served as a Commissioner for Fine Arts for the Mexican delegation to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he exhibited seventeen of his own oil paintings.

In 1888 Alfredo Dugès (1826–1910) renamed the species and dedicated it to Velasco as Ambystoma velasci (see also Plateau Tiger Salamander).

published Velascoa, which is a monotypic genus of flowering plants from north-eastern Mexico belonging to the family Crossosomataceae.

[8] His scenes of the Mexican landscape are a visual source for environmental historians, since they show the Valley of Mexico before its degradation in the twentieth century, with air pollution and urban sprawl.