Portal:California/Selected biography/18

Xavier Timoteo Martínez (February 7, 1869 – January 13, 1943) was a California artist who flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was born in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and, after becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, died in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Martinez was a founder of the California Society of Artists and associated with well known artists of the era including Francis McComas, Childe Hassam and Arthur Mathews.

Martinez began sketching his classmates and teachers at a young age while attending public school. After school he worked in his father's bookstore bookbinding and helping with printing chores. He learned French and wrote poetry, admiring the poems of Goethe, Schiller and various French poets. In his later autobiographical writings he recalled how at age ten his mother would teach him about the movements of celestial bodies. Martinez reflected that at this age he had his first awareness that there was a rhythm in the order of things. At age 13 he began attending the Liceo de Varones (Grammar School for Men), where he studied pre-Columbian archaeology and his Tarascan heritage. He excelled in Indian designs and arts, and painted an oil copy of Entombment by Titian.