Beauford Delaney sketchbook dated March 1940. Contains meditations of Beauford Delaney’s time spent in his Greene Street apartment exploring thoughts of loneliness, suffering, humanity, love, and what it is to be an artist. Contains a list of influential artists including Vincent van Gogh, Louis Eilshemius, and Leonardo da Vinci, and composers Franz Schubert and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whom Delaney is researching for the purpose of defining the ‘aura surrounding artistic personality'. Delaney muses on the social standards of art, art education, and what constitutes the maturity of an artist. Delaney also utilized this sketchbook to draft letters to Al Hirschfeld and others. Among the writing are ink and graphite sketches of pianists, jazz clubs, expressionistic landscapes, and classical anatomical and portrait studies.