A casual interest in learning to paint led Marsh, in 1921, to begin taking classes at the Art Students League of New York, where his first teacher was John Sloan. By 1923 Marsh began to paint seriously. In this year he also married Betty Burroughs, another student at the college and daughter to artist Bryson Burroughs. The marriage ended in divorce in 1933. In 1925, Marsh visited Paris for the first time since he had lived there as a child and he fell in love with what the city had to offer him. Although Marsh had appreciated the drawings of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo since he was a child—his father's studio was full of reproductions of the old masters' work—the famous paintings that he saw at the Louvre and other museums stimulated in him a new fascination with those painters.