REGINALD MARSH
Bread Line.
Pencil on cream wove paper, circa 1930. 214x353 mm; 8x13 inches. Signed "Reginald Marsh," by the artist's wife, Felicia Marsh, and with the estate inventory number "D IV-13" in pencil, lower right recto. Provenance: Private collection, Toronto.Born in Paris, the second son in a well-to-do family, Marsh attended Yale University and then moved to New York where, during the early 1920s, 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 (1871-1951), as well as American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Old Masters such as Rubens, Titian and Tintoretto. He wholly rejected the avant-garde artistic movements gaining strength in America at the time—Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction. Instead he pursued a style that is best summed up as modern 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. The current drawing resembles a number of Marsh's (1898-1954) Depression-era works, notably of the crowded Bowery Street (the tempera on Masonite painting The Bowery, 1930, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the same-titled 1928 lithograph (see Sasowsky 16) and of his various scenes of urban charity. A sketch for his 1932 etching Bread Line— Not One Has Starved (see Sasowsky 139), closely resembling the drawing, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, accession number 80.31.29.