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Fat Lady on the Beach 1954 20th Century 7 3/4 in. x 10 in. (19.69 cm x 25.4 cm) Reginald Marsh (Paris, France, 1898 - 1954) Object Type: Drawing Medium and Support: egg, ink on panel Credit Line: Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection: Purchase, Tabriz Fund. 1982.015 Accession Number: 1982.015 Comments: Marsh was enchanted with New York City and its people.  He prowled its streets with a sketchbook seeking his subjects, loving the crowds, the Bowery, Fifth Avenue, and the theater district.  Marsh had a responsive feeling for the lower classes, the vulgar and seamy aspects of New York.  He found his Venuses striding under the elevated tracks, at the Burlesque houses, sunning on a Harlem street corner, or flirting with a lifeguard at Coney Island.  As an illustrator, Marsh approached his urban subjects with a journalist's sharp eye.  Marsh drew in pencil, china ink, and with a burin, engraver and etching needle.  He emphasized watercolor so that he could preserve his drawing traces in color, which he could also do in the egg yolk medium.  In his use of drawing and color and the overlay of glazes, he sought to achieve the transparency and depth of the old masters.   Marsh's Fat Lady on the Beach, done the year of his death, is a jewel-like sheet onto which the artist has concentrated a trio of monumental figures, and conveyed the life experience of summer at Coney Island.  Marsh specifically remarked on this place, "I like to go there because of the sea, the open air, and the crowds - crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving - like the compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens." Though Marsh died prematurely, this small work epitomizes the aspects which affected him: journalism, suggested by the New York Post in left foreground; the concentration on un-idealized female anatomy, his debt to Rubens and the lure of the indigenous reality of New York.

Keywords:

• drawing
• American
• figure
• ink

Portfolio List
This object is a member of the following portfolios (click any portfolio name to view all objects in that portfolio):

• Masterworks: Drawing
• Twentieth Century American Drawings

Keywords:

• Artist:North American:American
• Class:Fine Arts:drawing
• Class:Fine Arts:drawing:ink
• Subject:figure

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