REGINALD MARSH
Courtship.
Lithograph on Chine appliqué, 1932. 190x245 mm; 7x9 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 1/22 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early lithograph.We have found only 4 other impressions of this lithograph at auction in the past 30 years.Born in Paris, the second son in a well-to-do family, Marsh (1898-1954) 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. Sasowsky 22.