Train

The urban realist Reginald Marsh depicted modern New York life—burlesque theaters, crowded subways, popular beaches—in a variety of media. Watercolor allowed him to work quickly, a manner that he had developed as a newspaper and magazine illustrator. In this picture, Marsh used both dry and wet washes: note how he blurred the outline of the locomotive by letting wet paints bleed into each other in order to convey the sense of the train’s velocity as it speeds through the landscape.