This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  An urban realist painter of New York City genre, Reginald Marsh devoted
his career to depicting people going about their everyday business
including Bowery bums, vulgar party goers, and persons elbowing their
way in crowded subways. He was also a printmaker, completing about 236
etchings*, lithographs*, and engravings*, and devoted much time,
especially in the 1930s, to printmaking*. Many of his paintings were
done in watercolor and egg tempera*.
He was born in Paris to
American-born artist parents, Fred Dana and Alice Randall Marsh. His
family settled in Nutley, New Jersey in 1900 and later in New Rochelle,
New York. After graduating from Yale University, he worked as a
free-lance illustrator in New York City for the Daily News and The
New Yorker and studied at the Art Students League*.
He was
much influenced by urban realists John Sloan, George Luks and Kenneth
Hayes Miller. He went briefly to Europe and then returned to New York
to pursue his sympathetic depiction of low-life subjects. In the 1930s,
he did murals for the W.P. A.*, and in 1943, he was elected a full Academician to the National Academy of Design*.
Reginald Marsh died in Dorset, Vermont in 1954.
Source:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
* For more
in-depth information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary
http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Reginald Marsh was born in Paris, France in 1898, the child of artist
parents. He was born over a small cafe on Paris' Left Bank. He was
brought to the United States in 1900 and was drawing before he was
three. He studied art at Yale University and the Art Students League,
during which time he worked primarily as an illustrator for New York
newspapers and magazines. After studying in Paris in 1925 and 1926, he
turned seriously to painting. In 1929 he was introduced to the
egg-tempera medium, which he used extensively the rest of his life.
Marsh's
gusto for painting the bottom crust of society contrasted curiously
with his background. His parents, both well-known artists, were steeped
in academic traditions. He attended Lawrenceville Academy and Yale;
perhaps this elite background made it possible to paint the earthy
people he did with a journalist's objectivity.
An admirer of
Rubens and Delacroix, he disliked modernist art; indeed, his lifelong
preoccupation was with people - enjoying themselves at beaches, at
amusement parks, or on crowded city streets. Marsh was a
second-generation Ash Can School painter and printmaker, best known as
an urban regionalist. He spent his days sketching in small notebooks
with a pen.
He died in 1954 of a heart attack.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Dictionary of American Art by Matthew Baigell, published by Harper and Row, 1979
Time magazine, November 7, 1955
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Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, E-O):
|  Reginald Marsh was the consummate chronicler of everyday urban life, turning his discerning eye to the streets of New York. In countless paintings, drawings, illustrations, and sketches, he captured the city’s modernity—electric lights, movie theaters, and billboards; its bustling city centers—Central Park, Coney Island, and Union Square; and its seediness—the down-and-out figures in the Bowery. When asked for his advice to young painters, he replied, “How to draw? Go out into the street, stare at the people. Stare, stare, keep on staring. Go to your studio, stare at your pictures, yourself, everything.” (1)
Born in Paris, Marsh’s parents were both artists: Fred Dana Marsh, a painter whose work documented the construction of many New York City skyscrapers, and Alice Randall, a miniature painter. Marsh attended Yale University, and was the star illustrator for "The Yale Record," the campus humor magazine. Upon graduation in 1920, he went to New York with the hopes of launching his career as a freelance illustrator. Two years later, he landed a job as a staff artist for the "Daily News." In his first assignment, the series “Subway Sunbeams,” he documented the humorous side of city life; the success of the series secured him a daily column, where he depicted the performers and attendees of the popular vaudeville shows. Years later Marsh wrote of the "Daily News" experience, “It was interesting work. . . . On Mondays I’d visit so many vaudeville shows I’d lose track of the number.” (2) At the same time, he began painting scenes of street life in New York in oil and watercolor.
By 1924, only four years after moving to New York, he had his first one-man show at the Whitney Studio Club, the gallery pioneered by Juliana Force. The following year he joined the staff of "The New Yorker," a position he held for seven years. He provided “Profile” portraits and humorous illustrations, and he covered plays, movies, and metropolitan life in general. Marsh wrote of his newspaper career, “It took the place of an art school, and was very good training because you had to get the people in action, and sketch them quickly.” (3)
This is not to say that Marsh had no formal training. During his senior year at Yale, he took classes in still life and antique drawing. His first year in New York he spent four months in John Sloan’s evening drawing class at the Art Students League (1920-21), and in 1922, he spent a month each in the life classes of Kenneth Hayes Miller, George Bridgman, and George Luks, all at the League. Of these superb teachers, Miller became a lifelong mentor, friend, and confidante of Marsh. It was Miller who encouraged the young artist to paint the earthy vitality and social landscape of life in New York, subjects typical of American scene painting.
In 1925, Marsh traveled with his first wife, sculptor Betty Burroughs, to Europe where he studied and copied the works of the Old Master painters such as Rubens, Rembrandt and Michelangelo, whom he particularly admired for their ability to organize large figure groups. Part of the vibrant New York artistic scene and a member of the Whitney Studio Club, Marsh developed close friends and colleagues. Thomas Hart Benton introduced Marsh to egg tempera, the medium in which most of his street scenes of the 1930s are painted. In the 1940s, he experimented with the “Maroger medium,” an oil emulsion formula that recreated the effects of the Old Master painters.
While Marsh was very busy with illustration work, he grew increasingly interested in the city’s poorer quarters, among the working poor and the unemployed-- along the waterfront, 14th Street, the Lower East Side, the Bowery, inside the subway, and along the railroad tracks that ran down 10th Avenue, a section called “Death Avenue.” He continued to observe New York life—its highs and its lows—until his untimely death in 1954 at the age of 56. That year, shortly before his death, Marsh received the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the highest award in the American cultural world.
1. Reinhold Heller, "Reginald Marsh, 1898-1954: Selected Paintings and Sketches from the Collections of Mrs. Reginald Marsh and the Honorable and Mrs. William Benton," exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Fine Arts Galleries of Pittsburgh, 1970), n.p.
2. Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh (New York: Harry N. Abrams), p. 24.
3. Ibid.
© Copyright 2008 Hollis Taggart Galleries |
Biography from ACME Fine Art:
| Reginald Marsh
1898-1954
Education:
Yale University (A.B.)
Art Students League
and with John Sloan and George Luks
Selected Exhibitions:
Salons of America, 1925,’31-’32,’34
Society of Independent Artists, 1939
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1932-‘57(gold medal ’45)
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1932-‘52
National Academy of Design, 1937(prize)
Art Institute of Chicago, 1931
Whitney Studio Club, 1924,’28
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1955(solo)
Selected Collections:
Museum of Modern Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
Art Institute of Chicago
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Museum of American Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
National Academy of Design
Addison Museum of American Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Wadsworth Atheneum
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Fogg Art Museum
Williams College Museum of Art
Norton Museum of Art
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Biography from The Caldwell Gallery - I:
| Reginald Marsh was a contemporary artist who was an instrumental art
figure in the Depression Era of New York City. He studied at
Yale, the Art Students League and Paris, and later learned an egg
tempera and emulsion technique when he studied with Jacques Maroger
from 1940-46.
He painted scenes of amusement parks, crowded subways, vaudeville and
night clubs as well as the busy harbors and railroad stations of New
York.
Marsh worked as a staff artist for the New York Daily News from 1922-25 and continued to be a contributing artist/writer for national magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar.
His retrospective was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
1955. Marsh was also a professor at the Art Students League from
1935-54.
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Biography from Spanierman Gallery:
| Reginald Marsh, renowned for his Depression-era portrayals of New York City life, was born in Paris to American parents, in 1898. He was raised in Nutley, New Jersey. His artistic career began during his student days at Yale, when he served as the editor and cartoonist for the Yale Record. After graduating in 1920, he spent several years working as an illustrator for various New York based periodicals, including the Daily News, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. In 1925 he traveled to Europe to study. His life long ambition was to render contemporary life in the style of the Old Masters.
Returning from Europe in 1926, Marsh enrolled in classes at the Art Students' League in New York. His instructors included two of the first generation Ashcan School painters, John Sloan and George Luks, whose urban iconography came to exert an important influence on his art. Following this, Marsh went on to paint murals for the Post Office Building in Washington, D.C. and for the New York Customs House. However, he spent most of his time producing paintings, etchings, lithographs and drawings of such city themes as subways, burlesque halls, Bowery bums, amusement parks and leggy girls on 14th Street. Many of his pictures, executed in watercolor and egg tempera or brush and ink, consist of phantasmagoric views of crowds of people taking part in rowdy yet exuberant social rituals. His vigorous, baroque style in which he emphasized physical action and strongly modeled forms, is firmly rooted in the tradition of such masters as Peter Paul Rubens and Eugene Delacroix. Although his subjects often relate to those of the social realists of the day, Marsh chose to remain aloof from all political entanglement, making his ideas known only through his art.
Marsh taught at the Art Students' League from 1935 until his death in 1954 in Dorset, Vermont. His work, widely acclaimed during his lifetime, can be found in major public and private collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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