Coney Island Bathers

If Reginald Marsh stole anything during his frequent visits to the Louvre, it was the spirit of the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens. And he took it straight to the teeming city of New York. Here the pumped-up bodies belong not to gods and heroes but to ordinary, anonymous people just getting through life and occasionally looking for a good time. Yet there is often an undercurrent of sadness in Marsh’s work. In Coney Island Bathers, people interact but show no sign of emotional connection, let alone intimacy. By the time he made this drawing, Marsh had grown less interested in the lives of his subjects and increasingly treated them as compositional elements for his painterly abstractions.