Reginald Marsh - Graphic Artist

Reginald Marsh is best known for his paintings of New York City: burlesque shows, Coney Island, the Bowery, movie houses, and elevated trains. His favorite place was Coney Island, where he rapidly sketched and photographed the bathers, an endless source for him of anatomies, postures, and compositions. But in the mid-1930s Marsh was engaged in mural painting, often depicting scenes of ships in New York Harbor. In 1936 he executed two panels for what is now the Federal Building in Washington, D.C. In August, 1936, the Treasury Relief Art Project hired him to paint the ceiling panels of the great hall of the Custom House on Bowling Green, New York City, designed by the architect Cass Gilbert. Between September 18 and December 21, 1937, he painted in fresco seco, or on dry plaster, eight small and eight large panels, the latter chronicling the arrival of three ocean liners in New York: the American Washington, the British Queen Mary, and the French Normandie.

In 1938, he executed three closely related easel paintings inspired by his work for the Custom House, in particular by the French Line's newest, fastest, and most luxurious transatlantic liner, the Normandie. One, an etching and engraving, of which Marsh printed twenty impressions on June 30, 1938, is entitled Battery (Belles), and shows a woman striding from the left side, holding her hat against the wind. Beyond the railing are a Dazzle Company tug, identified by the company "D" on its stack, and the unmistakable three stacks of the great ship. The harbor is identified by the Statue of Liberty in the far left background. Another, a large tempera (30 X 40 inches) entitled Belles of the Battery (The Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Ind.), depicts a similar Battery view, except that the Statue of Liberty is between the figures and the tugboat stack, and the tug has an "M" to identify the company. The Butler institute's

The Normandie is the third of this series. It is a larger watercolor, also originally entitled Belles of the Battery, and shows two women in the left foreground, one in the same striding, hat-holding posture as in the etching. As in the etching, there is Dalzell tug. Marsh was in the habit of painting in th( daytime and working on prints or photographs in the evening, so he was probably working on the print and the paintings at the same time. But when compared to the other two compositions, the watercolor The Normandie seems more spontaneous, more full of movement, suggesting it was executed first.

The watercolor is also the closest to a rapidly executed sketch, showing two women walking by the tug with the Normandie in the background. Marsh's accuracy in representing modern ships is comparable to that of nineteenth-century marine painters such as Fitz Hugh Lane, who made the elaborate rigging of sailing ships part of their design.