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Marsh employed a graphic, linear technique to bring individuality to the travelers.

The newspaper headline refers to the sentencing of the convicted kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh's baby.

Marsh's artistic inspiration derived from his study of European Old Master painters.

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Reginald Marsh

Hauptman Must Die, 1935

egg tempera on masonite

27 3/4 x 35 3/4 in.

Bequest of Felecia Meyer Marsh

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Reginald Marsh was born  in an apartment over a small café on the Left Bank in Paris and was brought to America when he was only two years old. His parents were artists Fred and Alice Marsh, who had their son drawing before the age of three. Marsh studied at the Art Students League and began his career as an illustrator for New York papers and magazines. He studied in Paris for a year in 1925 and in 1929 learned the egg tempera medium, which he would favor for the rest of his life. Marsh was an Urban Realist, taking society’s lower class for his subjects. Printmaking became another major medium for Marsh, who created 236 etchings, lithographs and engravings. He was a member of a small group of artists known as the Fourteenth Street School, which  included Isabel Bishop, Moses and Raphael Soyer, and their teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller. The group’s name was derived from their focus on urban scenes from Union Square on 14th Street in New York, also the site of the Art Students League.

The headline and title of the painting Hauptmann Must Die refer to the sentence given to the convicted kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh’s baby after a sensational trial. Each figure is sharply characterized in this painting of the dingy waiting room at Pennsylvania Station in 1935. Drawing was always the basis of Marsh’s art, and he employed a graphic, linear technique to bring individuality to the nameless travelers in this scene. While his subjects were drawn from common contemporary scenes, Marsh’s aesthetic inspiration derived from an intense study of European Old Master painters.  

Reference

Marilyn Cohen. Reginald Marsh’s New York: Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Photographs, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1983. ISBN-13: 978-0486245942

Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973. ISBN: 081090280X