Reginald Marsh, “Flying Concellos” , Etching and Engraving, Date of Plate 1936, Edition of 100, 8 x 10 in. Collection of the Art Students League of New York
Reginald Marsh is one of the best known chroniclers of 1930s and 40s New York. It has been said that Marsh was to New York what Daumier was to Paris and Hogarth was to London. His paintings, drawings, and prints capture the aura and pace of the ever-changing city at a particularly exciting time in its history.
Marsh was fascinated with the seedier aspects of New York, and he was an obsessive explorer of the great metropolis. It was in places such as Coney Island, the burlesque parlors and dance halls of Fourteenth Street, the Bowery, the streets, and the subway that the Yale educated, financially comfortable Marsh found the subjects he was looking for – Bowery bums, burlesque queens, musclemen, bathing beauties, and streetwalkers. Marsh returned repeatedly to his favorite locations, usually working on the spot with sketchbooks and taking photographs that were used as the source material for completed works back in his Fourteenth Street studio.