Traffic Light, 14th Street is part of a small, but innovative, group of critically acclaimed pillar paintings completed by Reginald Marsh toward the end of his career. We will let Lloyd Goodrich, former Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art explain, “One definitely new subject appeared, in a series of eight tall, narrow vertical paintings of the lampposts and traffic signals of New York. Marsh liked the old-fashioned posts with their ornament, unfunctional design, their heavy basses, their iron filigree work, and all the objects that had become attached to them; traffic lights and a multitude of directional signs, arrow and warnings. One particular post at Fourteenth Street and Union Square was a model for four or five paintings. The old lampposts were beginning to be replaced by streamlined ones, which he regretted, saying: ‘The new ones are not so good to look at’ . . . other oils such as Traffic Post, 14th Street are painted throughout in substantial pigment and with a fully loaded brush. But instead of the uniform impasto of his earlier Maroger pictures, there is variation between thick and thin, opaque and transparent. He was now using the oil medium as it should be used, and as he had always striven to use it: with both rich substance and translucency, with no loss of draftsman-like skill but without too much dependence on line, and with all his gift for drawing with the brush. . . .To compare two portraits of the same object, the oil Traffic Post, 14th Street within its restricted color range is rich in substance and painterly in style; the tempera No Turns is transparent in handling, pale in color, and linear in technique, but it has a luminosity that was new in his work. Even at this stage there was still this curious division in his painting technique and style. He was still searching for the methods that would suit him best. If he had lived longer he would probably have brought these two styles together, achieving the substance of oil and the luminosity of tempera. As it was, his paintings of these years, though not as large or complex as some of his earlier works, marked an advance in intrinsic quality. The exuberance of former years had been replaced by refinement and skill.”