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Reginald Marsh
1898–1954
BirthplaceParis, France
Death placeDorset, Vermont, United States of America
BiographyReginald Marsh was an important urban-realist painter of Depression-era New York. His work is a vibrant social and historical chronicle of the city, featuring scenes of everyday urban life, from its underbelly to its shopping districts and entertainment venues. Born into a wealthy family, Marsh graduated from Yale Art School in 1920. After a brief sojourn in Europe he attended the Art Students League in New York, where, after 1935, he began a long teaching career. An inheritance supplemented Marsh’s modest income from both teaching and working as an illustrator for the Daily News, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
Marsh’s New York was vulgar, chaotic, and teeming with life. The city fascinated him, providing him with endless inspiration from the 1920s to the 1950s. Whether he worked in egg tempera, oil paint, Chinese ink, intaglio, or watercolor, Marsh sought to depict life’s seamy theater as he found it in the mobs on the subway, the shop girls on Fourteenth Street, the drifters on the Bowery, the performers at burlesque houses, the taxi-dancers at dime-a-dance joints, and the throngs at Coney Island’s beaches, amusement parks, and sideshows. Marsh was a member of a group of painters called the Fourteenth Street School, led by Kenneth Hayes Miller, so-named for the Union Square area of Manhattan in which these artists had their studios and often found their subject matter.
Marsh’s New York was vulgar, chaotic, and teeming with life. The city fascinated him, providing him with endless inspiration from the 1920s to the 1950s. Whether he worked in egg tempera, oil paint, Chinese ink, intaglio, or watercolor, Marsh sought to depict life’s seamy theater as he found it in the mobs on the subway, the shop girls on Fourteenth Street, the drifters on the Bowery, the performers at burlesque houses, the taxi-dancers at dime-a-dance joints, and the throngs at Coney Island’s beaches, amusement parks, and sideshows. Marsh was a member of a group of painters called the Fourteenth Street School, led by Kenneth Hayes Miller, so-named for the Union Square area of Manhattan in which these artists had their studios and often found their subject matter.