The Arthur Beecher Carles papers consist of correspondence, programs, notebooks, sketches, photographs, invitations, ephemera, and other materials. The majority of the correspondence is addressed to Carles, there is also small amount of letters either addressed to others or written by Carles and never sent. The largest number of letters are from Mercedes de Cordoba to Carles. There are also letters from Edward Steichen, Henry Bainbridge McCarter, Robert B. Harshe, and others in the arts and literary community.

Arthur Beecher Carles (1882-1952), an American Modernist painter active in the first half of the twentieth century was born in Philadelphia, and he became part of a circle of artists in pre-WWI France that included a network of figures responsible for the emergence of American modernism, particularly through his connections with Eduard Steichen and John Marin (and through them, Stieglitz, Brancusi, Man Ray, and others). Carles studied, and later taught, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He exhibited at the ground-breaking 1913 'Armory Show', the first major modernist exhibit in the US. Carles married Mercedes de Cordoba, a musician and model to whom he had been introduced through Steichen. Their daughter, Mercedes Carles (later, Mercedes Matter), developed her artistic talent first under her father's tutelage before going on to become a major figure in post-WWII American Arts in her own right

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