Oil and ink on paper and panel, 1953. 252x200 mm; 9⅞x7⅞ inches. Signed and dated lower right.
Provenance [with] Bernard Danenberg Gallery, New York. [with] ACA Heritage Gallery, New York (label). Private Estate. Christie's, New York, December 14, 2015, lot 321. Private collection, Pennsylvania.
Born in Paris, the second son in a well-to-do family, Reginald Marsh attended Yale University and then moved to New York where, during the early 1920's, he worked as an illustrator and took classes at the Art Students League. Marsh was equally influenced by his art teachers in New York, notably John Sloan, as well as American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Old Masters such as Rubens, Titian and Tintoretto. He wholly rejected the modern artistic movements gaining strength in America at the time-Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction. Instead he pursued a style that is best summed up as social realism: depictions of everyday life in New York, Coney Island beach scenes, vaudeville and burlesque women, the jobless on the streets of New York and the railroad yards and freight trains in New York and New Jersey.
