About the Reginald Marsh papers

After graduating from Yale University in 1920, Marsh moved to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for the New York Evening Post and Herald, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar. Beginning in 1922, he worked as staff artist at the New York Daily News doing a cartoon review of vaudeville and burlesque. During the 1920s, he designed theater curtains for the Greenwich Village Follies and other theater productions, and became one of the original cartoonists at The New Yorker after it was founded in 1925, actively working for the magazine until 1931 and regularly contributing drawings from time to time after that.

In 1923, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, who was the daughter of the curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and herself a sculptor. They divorced in 1933, and he married his second wife, Felicia Meyer, a landscape painter, in 1934.

In the early 1920s, Marsh began to study painting and attended classes taught by John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, among others, at the Art Students League in New York. He made several trips to Europe, once in 1925-1926 and again in 1928, to study the old masters in the museums. In 1929, he began to paint in egg tempera. He also worked in watercolor, painting several large compositions in 1939-1940. In the 1940s, he studied the "Maroger medium" with Jacques Maroger and began to use this emulsion technique in his paintings. In addition to painting, he also worked in lithography, etching, and engraving.

Marsh had his first one-man show of oils and watercolors at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924 and another show of lithographs there in 1928. He had one-man shows of his watercolors at the Valentine Dudensing Galleries in 1927, the Weyhe Gallery in 1928, and the Marie Sterner Galleries in 1929. In 1930, he had his first show of paintings at the Rehn Galleries, where he regularly exhibited for the next two decades.

In 1935 and 1937 respectively, Marsh was commissioned by the Treasury Department Art Program to paint two murals in the Post Office Department Building in Washington, D.C. and a series of murals in the rotunda of the Customs House in New York. Beginning in 1935, Marsh taught drawing and painting at the Art Students League. In the summer of 1946, he was guest instructor at Mills College, Oakland, California, for six weeks. In 1949, he was appointed head of the Department of Paintings at Moore Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, Philadelphia and taught advanced painting there in 1953-1954.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, some of Marsh's art work began to be reproduced on greeting cards issued by the American Artists Group and Living American Art, Inc. He also did illustrations for editions of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1938), John Dos Passos's USA (1945) and Adventures of a Young Man (1946), and Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (1946), among others. He continued to do freelance illustrations for magazines, including Esquire, Fortune, and Life. Notably, he served as an artist correspondent for Life during the Second World War, and traveled to Brazil in 1943 to draw the army installations there.

Marsh was the recipient of various awards throughout his career, including the M. V. Kohnstamm Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931, the First W. A. Clark Prize and Corcoran Gold Medal from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1945, and the Gold Medal for Graphic Arts of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.

Marsh died of a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont on July 3, 1954.

This biographical note draws heavily from information originally printed in the catalogue of the Reginald Marsh Retrospective Exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum in 1955. HIDE

Marsh's correspondence is typically with family, friends, artists, colleagues, dealers, government officials, publishers, greeting card companies, admirers and former students. Correspondence concerns both personal and professional matters, documenting his relationships with family and friends and his work on various projects ranging from book illustrations to the murals he executed as part of the Treasury Department Art Program. Diaries include those Marsh kept as an adolescent, those in which he recorded his technique and work on art, and those in which he recorded his daily engagements. Notebooks include ones on art, in which he recorded notes on particular works and on painting techniques, mediums and other processes; ones used as address books and to record notes on travel and art work; and ones on finances, in which he kept track of earnings from his stocks and art, as well as some student notebooks. Diaries and notebooks both document various practical aspects involved in the creation of Marsh's art work.

Sketches include ones on loose sheets and scraps of paper and in sketchbooks, documenting some of the sources and recurrent themes of Marsh's art work, as well as shedding light on Marsh's process of creation. Scrapbooks consist primarily of clippings (illustrations, reviews, reproductions of art work) compiled by Marsh, documenting the publication, exhibition, and reception of his art work. Business and financial papers consist of paperwork (contracts, agreements, statements, receipts, permissions) relating to business matters, practical concerns, and financial aspects involved in handling his various art projects and in exhibiting and selling his art work. Photographs include ones of Marsh's family and friends, the artist at work (sketching around Coney Island and on the streets of New York), and his art work (some of which was compiled into volumes by Marsh and some of which was compiled by Norman Sasowsky).

Also found are limited amounts of biographical material, including juvenilia, official documents, awards and certificates, writings, an appraisal of Marsh's estate, and catalogs of Marsh's art work, and printed material, including exhibition catalogs, clippings, and publications. HIDE

General Correspondence

• American Artists Group, Inc.: 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1941, 1942
• Archer, Edmund: 1944, 1949
• Arms, John Taylor: 1945, 1948, 1951
• Art Institute of Chicago (School): 1945
• Arts Bureau of Gartner and Bender, Inc.: 1947
• Associated American Artists, Inc.: 1940
• Barrymore, Lionel: 1949
• Bartlett, Clay: 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, undated
• Baum, Richard F.: 1953, 1954
• Bishop, Isabel: 1942, 1950, undated
• Book-of-the-Month Club: 1945, 1946
• Bork, Jacob: 1936
• Burroughs, Alan: 1930, 1953
• Carnegie Institute: 1947
• Coates, Robert M.: 1921, 1922, 1954, undated
• Corcoran Gallery of Art: 1945, 1954
• Cornelius, Marty: 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952
• Coutts, Jeane: 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951
• Dreiser, Theodore: 1939
• Eakins, Susan: 1928, 1929
• Genauer, Emily: 1952
• Goodrich, Lloyd: 1927, 1940, 1951, undated
• Gregory, Alyse: 1936, 1938, 1940, 1945, 1947, 1952, 1953
• Hallmark Cards (Hall Brothers Inc.): 1950, 1951
• Harper's Magazine: 1953
• Hartmann, Sadakichi: 1939
• Hopkins, Peter: 1951
• Houghton Miflin Company: 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1954
• Huntley, Victoria Hutson: 1948
• Kelly, Augustus: 1942, 1943, 1944
• Kinsey, Alfred C.: 1950
• Kuniyoshi, Katherine (Schmidt): 1922, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933, undated
• Kuniyoshi, Yasuo: 1922, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, undated
• Laning, Edward: 1943, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952
• Larkin, Oliver: 1951
• Life Magazine: 1943
• Limited Editions Club: 1953, 1954
• Living American Art, Inc.: 1936, 1937, 1938, 1940, 1941
• Mandel, Estelle: 1951
• Maroger, Jacques: 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, undated
• Merton, Owen: 1927, 1928
• Merton, Thomas: 1932, undated
• Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1951, 1954
• Museum of the City of New York: 1953, 1954
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts: 1942
• Miller, Kenneth Hayes: 1929, 1933, 1943
• National Academy of Design: 1944
• National Institute of Arts and Letters: 1954
• New York Times: 1942
• Nordmark, Olle: 1939
• Overton, Richard C.: 1951, 1952, 1954
• Pantheon Books Inc.: 1951, 1954
• Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: 1941
• Philadelphia Museum of Art: 1944
• Pierpont Morgan Library: 1951
• Powys, Llewelyn: 1927, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, undated
• Pratt Institute: 1949
• Redelius, Frank: 1952, 1953
• Rehn Galleries (Frank K. M. Rehn, Inc.): 1948
• Rose, Billy: 1950
• Rothschild, Lincoln: 1950
• Royal Society of Arts, London: 1947
• Soyer, Raphael: 1951
• Treasury Department, Washington: 1944, 1952
• University of Rochester, College of Arts and Sciences: 1940
• Weyhe Gallery (E. Weyhe): 1943
• Whitney Museum of American Art: 1944, 1953, 1954
• Wilder, Thornton: 1923
• Worcester Art Museum: 1951
• Wyeth, Andrew: 1952, 1953

Project Correspondence

• Biddle, George: 1935, 1943
• Bruce, Edward: 1938
• Dows, Olin: 1935, 1936
• Jones, Cecil H.: 1936, 1937, 1938
• Nordmark, Olle: 1935, 1936, 1937, 1941, 1942
• Owen, William B.: 1936
• Rowan, Edward B.: 1935, 1936
• Sharkey, Alice M.: 1936
• Watson, Forbes: 1936, 1937