Reginald Marsh was born in Paris in 1898. His American parents, Fred and Alice Marsh, were painters. The family came home to the United States two years later, and young Marsh grew up in New Jersey. He attended Yale University and there began his career as an artist, serving as editor and cartoonist for The Yale Record. Upon graduation in 1920 he was employed as an illustrator for Vanity Fair and the New York Daily News. In 1925 he joined the staff of the New Yorker magazine, but left shortly thereafter to travel and study abroad. He returned to New York in 1926 and enrolled in the Art Students League, where he studied with Joan Sloan, George Luks, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. It was Miller, in fact, who encouraged Marsh to follow up on an impulse he brought back from Europe, to adapt the design and technique of certain old masters (Marsh admitted to being particularly impressed with Rubens and Delacroix) to the raw pictorial potential of his immediate contemporary surroundings.

To Marsh, that potential was indeed truly and often raw. He once remarked: "Well-bred people are no fun to paint." His favorite subjects consequently were people caught up in what to most would seem the unsavory aspects of ultra-urban life: Bowery derelicts, the burlesque theatre, dance halls, the public beach, the subway or the congested subway station. Certainly the element of social criticism is an integral feature of Marsh's imagery, and though he is identified as a social realist, and was, as Oliver Larkin calls him, "a parlor socialist," he was not otherwise radical or politically motivated. He was satisfied in letting his art be the extent of his political statement.

In the Hunter Museum's Subway -- l4th Street of 1930, the weighty, massive, dark ceiling of the station is accentuated by a series of long, parallel, near horizontals that comprise the overhead beams. The relatively low sight line augments this same feeling. The sense of enclosure is heavy and oppressive. The walking strides of the various characters in the scene establish a pattern of diagonals that enhances the perceived motion and scurry. Periodic blotches of bright color -- chiefly the greens, reds, and light blues of women's outfits -- further provide a kind of raucous vitality appropriate to the situation and useful in relieving an otherwise dingy setting. One interesting fellow in the center-left foreground momentarily arrests the staccato movement as he reads the latest flap in a sensationalist tabloid. Overall, though, the people seem to move determinedly, impervious to one another, preoccupied with their own concerns, and each one alone in the crowd.

In the early 1930s, Marsh did numerous depictions of New York's popular Gaiety Burlesque. Therefore the Hunter's painting, which identifies that troupe in its title, though undated was probably finished between 1930 and '33. "The burlesque show is a very sad commentary on the state of the poor man," the artist professed. "It is the only entertainment, the only presentation of sex that he can afford. As for painting it, the whole thing is extremely pictorial. You get a woman in the spotlight, the gilt architecture of the place, plenty of humanity. Everything is nice and intimate, not spread out and remote as in a regular theater." For this particular performance Marsh puts the viewer in the midst of the all-male audience. The other show spectators in the foreground are quite close by, as though seated immediately adjacent. Their gazes are fixed upon the stage, except for one grinning character in the lower left who looks back over his shoulder. His eyes catch ours. He seems to recognize us and acknowledges our just coming into the parquet.

Both paintings are highly narrative, which is no doubt a ramification of Marsh's early years as a story illustrator. And both paintings are in the artist's preferred medium, egg tempera, which, because it dries quickly and cannot readily be re-worked, was particularly well-suited to his essentially linear approach. Marsh was rather more a draftsman than a total painter; he "drew" with a brush, building up forms with graphic skill. He tended moreover to keep his paint translucent. Highlights are usually achieved by the gesso ground showing through thinly painted glazes. "This linear brushwork," observes Marsh biographer Lloyd Goodrich, "has a sureness and refinement that give it a beauty of its own, and that make his temperas repay close study."

Marsh taught drawing and painting at the Art Students League in the summers of 1935, '36, '39, '40, and '41. In 1942 he began to teach there in the regular school year as well, and did so for the rest of his life (except for summer 1946, when for six weeks he was a visiting instructor at Mills College in California). He was vice president of the League in 1933-34. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1937 and made full academician in 1943. In 1946 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. In June 1954 he was appointed art editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but a month later he died of a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont. He was fifty-six.