Reginald Marsh’s Murals
About Reginald Marsh
In 1937, Reginald Marsh, an Assistant Clerk in the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department, began to tackle decorating the panels within the dome of the Rotunda for 90 cents an hour. For Marsh, the painting of these murals was the culmination of years of ardent observation of New York’s shipping activities, its longshoremen, dock workers, tugboats, ocean liners, and cargo vessels. Marsh spent years as an illustrator, sketching theatrical scenes of the city, for magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker and New York Daily. He was the child of two artists, Frederic Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh. He had grown up a member of a privileged group, having visited Europe to study the old masters. Marsh also had unique technical knowledge of painting, experimenting with oils, watercolor, and then tempura painting on gesso with egg yolk glazes. This last technique enabled him to work on a larger scale without loosing form and light transparency.
Marsh and the Works Progress Administration
In 1934, the Treasury Department set up the Section of Painting and Sculpture, a program to commission well-known artists, who did not have to be on relief to qualify, to decorate government buildings. In 1935, the Treasury Relief Art Project was established with a budget of $600,000 to commission 450 unemployed American artists to decorate old and new government buildings. The two art programs joined in Washington, DC, employing painters and sculptors to decorate two government buildings, the Post Office and the Justice Department. Reginald Marsh was one of the 11 artists chosen for the Post Office project for a salary of $3,000.
The Rotunda Murals
Not long after completing the Post Office murals, Marsh was commissioned to decorate the eight large and eight smaller, concave panels in the Custom House rotunda. This was a far more complex proposition than he had ever faced. The eight small panels depict explorers providing a link to the large panels’ ship activity. Each small panel is the same in scale, tonality and viewpoint. In the large 8 panels, Marsh traces the course of a ship as it enters New York harbor, passes Ambrose Light, takes on a pilot, is met by a Coast Guard cutter, is boarded by government officials, passes the Statue of Liberty, provides the occasion for a press interview with a movie star (Greta Garbo), is warped to a pier by tugs, and unloads its cargo onto the pier. The frescos cost a total of $1560 for the government.
In January 1937, five months after the commission was offered to him, Marsh finished his preliminary drawings and they were approved by the Supervising Architect. From January 1937, debates began on Marsh’s use of the fresco secco technique to complete the murals. Due to Marsh’s characteristic desire for perfection, he hired Olle Nordstrom to serve as his technical advisor throughout the job, paying him out of his own pocket. In April 1937, the Collector of Customs, Henry Darning, approved Marsh’s sketches and the temporary installment of two 50 foot high moveable scaffolds.
On September 18, 1937, painting on the walls began. By means of a balopticon projector, slides of pencil sketches of the intended frescoes were projected on the empty panels and outlined in burnt sienna. Marsh and his assistants pushed the painting as hard as they pushed the replastering. Fourteen hour days were spent spraying the plaster and painting it in this fresco secco technique. Marsh did most of the actual painting, with the help of transitory assistants. By December 27, 1937, the panels were completed. They have been restored throughout the years and exist today as beautiful as ever in the Rotunda.
