The Barker

Reginald Marsh's The Barker presents a towering crush of humanity as a crowd of people, including two women obscenely stuffing themselves with food, swirl past an elevated group that serves as a living advertisement for the carnival attractions beyond. Leering over the passersby, the gesturing barker calls out the highlights of the entertainment demonstrated by two carnival beauties. Marsh's etching shows both his attention to detail and his skill in convincingly capturing modern Americans' lusty appetites for fun and entertainment. As in his circus painting Pip and Flip (TF 1999.96), The Barker juxtaposes gawking onlookers with the objects of their attention to comment ironically on the politics of public display. In this scene, the tangled confusion of figures, their faces distorted into grotesque personifications of lust and greed, recalls the moralizing quasi-religious allegories of northern European art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, one of the beauties, partly hidden behind the fleshy female displaying her back to the viewer, is bound by her outstretched arms to a crucifix-like framework; her downcast gaze is perhaps not simply an expression of modesty but an evocation of the dead Savior that highlights the universal nature of the frenzied sinning surrounding her. Marsh devoted much of his art to exposing human folly and appetite as it played out in New York's centers of public resort and amusement, notably the popular attractions found at famed Coney Island, possibly the setting for this print.

Marsh made his first etching in 1926. Although he studied at New York's Art Students League with John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, both noted for their etchings of New York City life, Marsh was primarily self-taught in the medium. He habitually worked on his intimately scaled black and white prints in the evenings in order to reserve daylight for painting in his studio. He based The Barker on a painting of the same subject, entitled  Wonderland Circus Side Show (private collection), made a year earlier.

Collection Cameo companion piece, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, August 1999.

The People Work: American Perspectives, 1840–1940 (Le Travail à l'oeuvre: les artistes américains 1840–1940), Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venues: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 15–May 25, 2003; Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, June 8–August 17, 2003. [exh. cat.]

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France,  April 1–October 31, 2008.

Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

 

Sasowsky, Norman. Reginald Marsh: Etchings, Engravings, Lithographs. New York: Praeger, 1956.

Sasowksy, Norman. The Prints of Reginald Marsh. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1976. No. 115, pp. 161–62.