The Art of Reginald Marsh
~ 1898 - 1954 ~
Modern American Artist

Born to artistic parents who were living and painting in Paris in 1898, two years later he was brought to Nutley, New Jersey. Steeped in academic tradition the young Reginald began to draw in his father's studio, where such visitors as Albert Sterner, Ernest Haskell and George Bellows would drop in for an exchange of ideas.

At Yale, where Marsh received his A.B. in 1920, he became a cartoonist on the Yale Record. This helped him later to start successfully as a free lance newspaper artist on the Daily News for three years, covering vaudeville acts. But the News job took little of his time and he was able to develop as a easel painter and scenic designer, and did special caricature curtains for J. Murray Anderson's Greenwich Village Follies under Robert Edmond Jones. He designed the Provincetown Players "Fashion." In the meantime he was studying drawing at night under John Sloan.

Marsh started to paint in 1923 and of those years he says: "There was a bewildering confusion of style, more than now, facing the novice. I wanted to be a Marin, a Cezanne, a Sloan, a Bouche or God knows what, but never a Saturday Evening Post artist..."

Marsh liked to paint burlesque because it portrayed in one picture a nude or near nude woman, baroque architecture for a setting, and a crowd of men for an audience. He liked the Coney Island beach for it's kinds of people, variety of design and great vitality. He found endless material to paint in New York, exciting, rarely touched, and waiting for the artist to make use of it.

In 1936 the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., commissioned him to paint murals depicting the transfer of mail. His easel pictures have been acquired numerous Museums, Art Institutes and University's .

Marsh was an energetic worker. High Yallar is typical of the lusty technique with which Marsh highlights the picturesque aspects of New York life. Pictured below, Transfer of Mail from Liner to Tugboat took just twenty-one days to paint the 13 1/2 by 7 ft. panels directly on wet plaster. The government paid Marsh $3,000, of which almost half went for materials.