Since his encounters with Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff, and the painters of the artists' colony in Worpswede, Rainer Maria Rilke has repeatedly and intensively engaged with painting. On his travels, he records his encounters with works of art from all epochs in congenial pictorial observations and reports on his discoveries and visual experiences in diary entries and letters. For the first time in this volume, Rilke's fascinating pictorial descriptions are juxtaposed with the works of Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Böcklin, van Gogh, Picasso, and others, which Rilke saw on his travels and translated into his precise language.