(Edge of the Sea)

 

Xavier Martinez

  1869 - 1943 (biography)

c. 1910  

color monotype 

7 5/8 x 7 5/8" image and paper size 

red monogram in lower left corner 

1 of 1 unique 

 

Saint Mary's College Museum of Art, The Nature of Collecting The early 20th century fine art collection of Roger Epperson, cat. no. 49 

fine buff-colored laid 

unique 

artist 

CAAL156 

$2,000.00 

An early color monotype by Xavier Martinez of the California coast. The work is trimmed to the edges, as is usual with his work. It is signed with his red XM in a circle monogram.

Martinez was an integral part of the Bay Area’s late 19th century art renaissance, helping to establish it as a destination for international artists, and to form its artistic identity, in his work as both an artist and a teacher. However, the influence of the European Tonalists, to whom he was exposed when he studied on scholarship in Paris, clearly left its mark on the artist, as is evident in this moody landscape monotype.

Martinez was a pivotal part of a group of San Francisco Bay Area printmakers that became interested in color monotype afer the 1906 earthquake. Martinez and Clark Hobart both exhibited color monotypes at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the only printmakers to do so. In 1912, he co-founded the California Society of Etchers.

A shoreline formed by strip of calm sea and golden sand, punctuated by a tumble of rocks and two young trees bent slightly from years of ocean winds, is without human interruption: no footprints, no picnickers, no swimmers. Martinez’s uncluttered composition is small and brief, needing few strokes to convey the familiar peace found on an isolated beach on a warm afternoon.