Portrait studies by Reginald Marsh, c1945

Frame: 19" x 15.5"
Portrait studies (sight to the mat): 13 5/8" x 10 1/8"

In 1949, Marsh had made a similar set of portrait studies of John Sloan for the New Yorker. These may well be of another artist with whom he worked closely--perhaps of John Steuart Curry, one of his contemporaries in the 1940s.

Reginald Marsh
(source: Wiki) Reginald Marsh (March 14, 1898 - July 3, 1954) was an American painter, born in Paris, most notable for his depictions of life in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Crowded Coney Island beach scenes, popular entertainments such as vaudeville and burlesque, women, and jobless men on the Bowery are subjects that reappear throughout his work. He painted in egg tempera and in oils, and produced many watercolors, ink and ink wash drawings, and prints.

A casual interest in learning to paint led Marsh, in 1921, to begin taking classes at the Art Students League of New York, where his first teacher was John Sloan. By 1923 Marsh began to paint seriously. In this year he also married Betty Burroughs, another student at the college and daughter to artist Bryson Burroughs. The marriage ended in divorce in 1933. In 1925, Marsh visited Paris for the first time since he had lived there as a child and he fell in love with what the city had to offer him. Although Marsh had appreciated the drawings of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo since he was a child--his father's studio was full of reproductions of the old masters' work--the famous paintings that he saw at the Louvre and other museums stimulated in him a new fascination with those painters.

While exploring the works of European painters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Rubens, Marsh met Thomas Hart Benton in one of the galleries in France. Benton, known today as a social realist, and regionalist painter, was also a great student of the Baroque masters. The resemblance Marsh saw between Tintorettos famous works and Benton's motivated Marsh to try to paint in a similar way. Following his European trip (in which he also visited Florence) Marsh returned to New York with a desire to utilize the principles he felt were evident in the art of the Renaissance painters--particularly the way large groups of figures, together with architecture or landscape elements, were organized into stable compositions.

Marsh then studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller and George Luks, and chose to do fewer commercial assignments. Miller, who taught at the Art Students League of New York, instructed Marsh on the basics of form and design, and encouraged Marsh to make himself known to the world. He looked at Marsh's early, awkward burlesque sketches and at his more conventional landscape watercolors and said, These awkward things are your work. These are real. Stick to these things and dont let anyone dissuade you! By the beginning of the 1930s Marsh began to express himself fully in his art. As late as 1944, Marsh wrote: I still show him every picture I paint. I am a Miller student.

Marsh began to work with John Steuart Curry after his training with Miller. Both Marsh and Curry took lessons from Jacques Maroger, whom Marsh met in New York City in 1940. Maroger, who was a former restorer at the Louvre, believed he had discovered the secrets of the old masters and was well known for his advocacy of a painting medium made by cooking white lead in linseed oil. Maroger provided a body of material documenting his work for Marsh and Curry to study, and they adopted his ideas.

Good condition overall