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.

[1] When Marsh was two years old his family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where his father acquired a studio home located on The Enclosure, a street that had been established as an artists' colony some decades earlier by the American painter Frank Fowler.

In 1922, he was hired to sketch vaudeville and burlesque performers for a regular New York Daily News feature, and when The New Yorker began publication in 1925, Marsh and fellow Yale Record alum Peter Arno were among the magazine's first cartoonists.

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.

[6] 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[7]—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.

[8] 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.

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.

When making prints of the etchings Marsh recorded how long the paper soaked for, the heating of the plate, and the nature of the ink used.

[11] Marsh's main attractions were the burlesque stage, the hobos on the Bowery, crowds on city streets and at Coney Island, and women.

[7] The painting Fourteenth Street (1934, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) depicts a large crowd in front of a theater hall, in a tumbling arrangement that recalls a Last Judgment.

[13] The drawings of burlesque and vaudeville acts Marsh made in the 1920s for the New York Daily News are among the first of his many images of popular theater.

Nonetheless, the lower class members of society were his preferred subject matter, as he contended that "well bred people are no fun to paint".

[14] Marsh's Bowery scenes depict people who had a crisis thrust upon them, which is why his work shows a loss of human integrity and control in all aspects.

[17] Marsh emphasizes the bold muscles and build of his characters, which relate to the heroic scale of the older European paintings.

Marsh said "I like to go to Coney Island because of the sea, the open air, and the crowds—crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving—like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens.

Marsh would sketch the seaports, focusing on the tugboats coming in and out of the harbor, and capturing the details of the boats such as the masts, the bells, the sirens, and the deck chairs.

According to art historian Marilyn Cohen, "[Marsh's] world is filled with display: movies, burlesque, the beach, and all forms of public exhibition.

A degree of mannerism is apparent in his later paintings, in which wraithlike figures "float in a watery netherworld" in a deeper pictorial space than that of his compositions of the 1930s.