Series consists of Marsh's personal and professional correspondence. Among the correspondents are vaudeville performers and producers, artists, museums, galleries, publishers, greeting card companies, government officials, admirers, and former students, as well as family and friends. Correspondence largely concerns Marsh's career as a painter and illustrator, and his relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.
Correspondence documents his work as a vaudeville reviewer for the New York Daily News from 1922 to 1925; the sale and exhibition of his art work; the publication of his illustrations and caricatures in various magazines; his book illustrations; and the reproduction of his art work on greeting cards produced by American Artists Group and Living American Art, Inc. There are also extensive files (which also contain scattered business, financial, and travel documents) relating to his work on two federal art projects, murals in the Post Office Department, Washington, D.C. (1935) and the Customs House in New York (1937), and his assignment as an artist correspondent in Brazil during the Second World War (1943). Similar materials are also found amongst the business and financial papers in Series 7.
Correspondence documents his relationships with his father, Fred Dana Marsh, his first wife, Betty Burroughs, and his second wife, Felicia Meyer Marsh, as well as his relationships with friends and colleagues, including the English writer, Llewelyn Powys, the artists, Yasuo and Katherine Kuniyoshi, and the U.S. Senator (and former Yale classmate), William Benton, who ended up being one of the largest collectors of Marsh's work.
Letters from artists, such as Edward Laning, and curators, such as Lloyd Goodrich, provide some sense of Marsh's methods and techniques for creating art work (especially his use of the "Maroger medium") and his views on art and current art movements (especially Abstract Expressionism). Correspondence pertaining to the award competition for the U.S. Building at the New York World's Fair, which includes versions of Marsh's letters to and letters from Edward Bruce of the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture, is especially suggestive of Marsh's strong feelings of "despair" over the lack of originality in contemporary art.
General correspondence is typically arranged in chronological files, interspersed with files named according to correspondent. Letters are typically to Marsh, unless otherwise noted. Project correspondence is arranged according to the name of the project on which Marsh worked or to which correspondence pertains. Envelopes, which had at some earlier point been separated from correspondence, and greeting cards are arranged in files at the end of the series. An appendix of significant correspondent's names from the chronological files is included in this finding aid.
See Appendix for a list of selected correspondents from Series 2.
Appendix: Selected Correspondents from Series 2:
This list represents only a selection of correspondents and does not include names of family.
General CorrespondenceAmerican 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 CorrespondenceBiddle, 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
Collection Restrictions:
The bulk of the collection has been digitized and is available online via AAA's website. Use of material not digitized requires an appointment.
Collection Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Collection Citation:
Reginald Marsh papers, 1897-1955. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Sponsor:
Funding for the processing of this collection was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
