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ORIGINAL AND VINTAGE .............REGINALD MARSH............'SEATED NUDE, PROFILE', INK WASH PAPER, 17" x 13"............
This is an 17" x 13" Original and Vintage ink on paper by the very important New York and Vermont painter, draftsman and printmaker Reginald Marsh, 1898-1954. This painting is an ink wash of a seated nude in profile. From the collection of a former student of Marsh, making it look like it was done in class as a teaching aid from a live model. Signed at lower right. Fine condition. In a new custom frame.
The Biography Follows:
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.
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