In 1906 the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker sketched an impression of her Paris studio on the back of an envelope (complete with modest furniture, stove, and her own pictures on the wall). Her choice of material reaffirms the presence of the studio as a theme in her letters. That year, for example, she wrote to her husband: ‘Sleeping among my paintings is delightful. My studio is very bright in the moonlight. When I wake during the night I jump out of bed and look at my work. And in the morning it’s the first thing I see.’

Around seventy years later, the American poet Adrienne Rich borrowed a version of these words for her own poem, titled – as though it were a letter – ‘Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff’. With the lines ‘I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures / come alive in the light’, she imagines Modersohn-Becker writing to Westhoff, a friend and fellow artist with whom she did often correspond. In 2022, another form of fictional correspondence between women artists appeared in Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John. In this blend of biography and memoir, the contemporary British painter imagines writing a series of letters to the long-deceased Welsh painter who was a contemporary of Modersohn-Becker in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century.

The studio is again a pressing theme. Inspired by Gwen John’s paintings of empty rooms and isolated, contemplative women, Celia Paul stresses the need to protect at all costs what she calls, acknowledging Virginia Woolf, ‘a room of my own’. ...