Barrel of Fun

The 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."