TitleBarrel of Fun
Artist
Reginald Marsh
(1898 - 1954)
Date1943
MediumOil on composition panel
DimensionsUnframed: 24 × 29 3/4 in.
Framed: 29 1/4 × 35 1/8 × 1 1/8 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "REGINALD MARSH / 1943".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, April 3, 1944
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number824-P
Label TextThe Barrel of Fun was once located at the ocean side entrance of the Coney Island Amusement Park. The historian John F. Kasson has noted that this huge revolving cylinder "frequently rolled patrons off their feet and brought strangers into sudden, intimate contact." Marsh transforms the scene into a voyeuristic scramble of bodies in motion. The artist was a great admirer of the work of Peter Paul Rubens and Eugène Delacroix, and sought to transfer the vitality and energy that he discovered in their work into his modern urban subjects. Marsh's teacher and mentor Kenneth Hayes Miller remarked that Marsh used "the principles of design in the art of the past and [applied] them to the raw materials of the present."
