Reginald Marsh is best known for his busy, engergetic, sometimes bawdy portrayals of low life in New York. His era was the heyday of American Scene painting, during the thirties, and his particular scene was the vulgar reality of city life that ran from the Bowery sidewalks to the crowded beach at Coney Island. The sense of teeming life pervades these works, and the dominant interest is always the human figure.

Perhaps this very enthusiasm for depicting the human situation provides the key to the extraordinary desolation of this watercolor from 1930. Even with a very simple design, this portrait of an old house gains its haunting quality from the absence of people. For Marsh especially, the empty streets and blank, shaded windows would bespeak an immense emptiness. The house evens stands in grey isolation from the crowded buildings in the background.

Watercolor, with its fluid transparency and visible foundation in drawing, was Marsh's most natural medium. A continual researcher into techniques, he worked in all the graphic media, and carried his search into different forms of oil and tempera painting. Yet it is often in Marsh's most direct and immediate work in drawing and watercolor, such as this Chicago scene, that his unique view of city life is presented in its most effective terms.  Source: Bulletin, September 1967.