Marsh, Reginald

1898-1954
Marsh, Reginald Biography

American painter, whose pictures of the raffish aspects of New York City life have a Hogarthian liveliness. His art works, for all their slapdash exuberance and piled-on detail, are skillfully composed and carefully drawn. After graduating from Yale University in 1920, Reginald Marsh worked as a freelance illustrator in New York and from 1922 to 1925 was on the staff of the New York Daily News. He was also an original member of the staff of The New Yorker magazine (founded in 1925). Reginald Marsh traveled to Europe intermittently between 1925 and 1929. During these trips, he studied the work of the Old Masters, whose vigorous style would influence his own art work. Throughout the 1920s Marsh studied at the Art Students League of New York under such artists as John Sloan and George Luks, whose preoccupation with modern urban life also influenced him.

In 1929 Marsh began to paint the life around him in New York. He walked the streets of the city, sketching the neighbourhoods, people, subways, elevated trains, and movie and burlesque houses. He went on to paint his most characteristic work-street scenes, crowds, and honky-tonks.

In particular he was attracted to Coney Island beach, with its huge, often chaotic crowds. Marsh was also fascinated with the derelicts of the Bowery,whom he painted nonjudgmentally and without a note of social protest.

Reginald Marsh taught at the Art Students League from 1934 until his death and also at the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry, in Philadelphia, from 1949.

You can buy Reginald Marsh fine art reproduction oil paintings at Galerie Dada. Just click on the 'Back' button.

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