Reginald Marsh

Reginald Marsh was born in Paris and was a notable painter of New York City scenes. Both of his parents Alice Randall Marsh (1869-1929) and Frederick Dana Marsh (1872-1961) were American painters who lived in Paris. The family was wealthy and moved back to New Jersey when he was 2-years-old. Marsh studied at Yale University and then moved to New York, where he was a student of, for instance, Benjamin Luks, and began to work as an illustrator. Numerous well-known magazines such as Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar published his works. In the mid-1920s Marsh traveled extensively through Europe.

Marsh later devoted himself to etchings, and oil and watercolor painting. His main motivation were the burlesque, the poor and socially deprived of New York. One of his most famous students in his Department at the Art Students League in New York was the renowned pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). Marsh also lectured in Oakland and Philadelphia.

His etching Wrestlers, exhibited “hors concours” in 1932, had a format of 17.8 x 12.8 cm and was created in 1931. It is much more difficult to identify the work for the 1936 Art Competitions titled The Bathers. Marsh produced numerous drawings, prints and watercolors depicting bathers but almost all of them are dated from the 1940s and 1950s. Various etchings entitled Coney Island Beach from 1934 and 1935, however, became well-known showing groups of bathers.