Reginald Marsh
Reginald Marsh
1898 - 1954
American painter, printmaker and illustrator. He returned from France to the USA with his American parents, Fred Dana Marsh (1872–1961) and Alice (née Randall) Marsh (1869–1929), who were also artists, in 1900. In 1920 he graduated from Yale University, New Haven, CT, where he had been art editor and cartoonist for the Yale Record. He moved to New York and became staff artist for Vanity Fair and the New York Daily News. By 1923 he had begun painting scenes of street life in New York in oil and watercolour. His first one-man show was held at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924. In 1925 he joined the New Yorker, to which he contributed regularly until 1931.
In 1925 Marsh travelled with his first wife, sculptor Betty Burroughs, to Europe where he studied and copied the works of the Old Master painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo, whom he particularly admired for their ability to organize large figure groups. In 1927–8 he studied at the Art Students League in New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller, who encouraged him to paint the earthy vitality and social landscape of life in New York, subjects typical of AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING. Marsh painted and made prints of scenes such as Dance Marathon (engraving, 1932; Storrs, U. CT, Benton Mus. A.), Times Square, the ‘El’ or elevated railway, and the Bowery, often taking preparatory photographs, for example those of Lifeguards (New York, Mus. City NY) at Coney Island, for the painting of the same title (tempera on panel, 1933; Athens, U. GA Mus. A.).
In 1929 Marsh was shown by Thomas Hart Benton how to use egg tempera, the medium in which most of his street scenes of the 1930s are painted (see On Fourteenth Street, 1934). In the 1940s he experimented with the ‘Maroger medium’, an oil emulsion formula promoted by Jacques Maroger of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, who believed it to have been used by some Old Master painters. In the last two decades of his life Marsh continued to depict the same themes, for example The Bowery—Strokey’s Bar (tempera on panel, 1953; New York, Whitney). [M. Sue Kendall. "Marsh, Reginald." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T054580.]
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