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Artists' writings and correspondence provide fascinating portraits of the individual and have become indispensable references for scholarship. Letters provide as much information in their content as they do their form, offering slivers of detail concerning the author's daily lives and artistic practices, and can correct previously-held notions derived from anecdotal sources. Accessibility to these documents, both in translation and in their material form, has the ability to transform scholarship and deepen our understanding of the author's interior world. In anticipation of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s forthcoming publication, The Letters of Edgar Degas by Theodore Reff, we celebrate several nineteenth-century painters whose writings have become integral to our discussion of their respective oeuvres.

Our discussion will center on the ways scholars have used and continue to use these documents in their research, speak to the challenges inherent to their translation, interpretation, and preservation, and how these sources benefit from greater accessibility through digitization. We reflect upon the endeavor of creating tomes of artist's writings with the art historians who have consolidated, translated, and offered their insights into the correspondence and writings of Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin.