This is the record for the sheet you bought: which original it comes from, how it was digitised, what we did to the file, and what we are allowed to sell. Nothing here is marketing. It is the paperwork.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Carl Blechen (German, 1798–1840), The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, 1834
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 135 × 126 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Accession
- 1996.388 (object 144969)
- File
- AIC IIIF, 6050 × 6497 px native
- Crop
- None — the whole file is printed
- Printed at
- 393 dpi at 50 × 50 cm · 300 dpi at 70 × 70 cm
Which painting, and why this one
Friedrich Wilhelm III commissioned this and paid Blechen 1000 Taler for it in 1834. The building is Schinkel's palm house on the Pfaueninsel outside Potsdam — a glass hall the king filled with palms bought from a Paris collection, and Blechen filled it further with light, Indian textiles and figures who are not quite in Prussia any more. The palm house burned down in 1880, so the painting is now the fullest surviving record of the inside of it.
The picture's own route is worth the paragraph: probably given by the king to his daughter Charlotte, who as Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna took it to Russia; possibly in the imperial collection until after 1917; in a Swiss collection by around 1920; bought by the Art Institute in 1996.
Two related versions exist and are not what you have: the 1832 colour study in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and a smaller 1833 version (64 × 56 cm) in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Yours is the large royal commission.
What we measured
We profiled twelve columns and twelve rows at each of the four edges. Mean luminance runs 104–108 on the left, 52–57 on the right and 44–45 at the top, all with spreads of 20 to 200 — painted surface everywhere, no scanner ground, no studio floor. Nothing is trimmed; the file is the canvas edge to edge.
Ratio 6050 / 6497 = 0.9312 against the catalogued 126 / 135 = 0.9333 — 0.2 %, inside the museum's own rounding.
Why the 70 × 70 sheet has wide margins. That sheet is set by resolution, not by our usual 8 % border. At 300 dpi, 6050 px carry an image 51.21 cm wide, so the side margin comes out at 9.40 cm instead of 5.6. A standard border would have needed 58.8 cm of image — 6945 px, which the file does not have. We widened the margin rather than upscale the painting.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Blechen died in 1840 and painted this in 1834. Public domain in every market we serve.
The digitisation. The Art Institute of Chicago releases images of its public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0); its API reports is_public_domain: true for this object. Commercial use is expressly permitted, a caption requested rather than required — this record carries it. File taken from the museum's own IIIF endpoint, not from an aggregator.
Our file. The tonal work and the border are ours. We sell you a print of it; we do not sell you the rights to it.
Rights checked 1 September 2026.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 50 cm
- Image 39.10 × 42.00 cm, 0.31× original. Margins 5.45 cm sides / 3.72 cm top / 4.29 cm bottom
- 70 × 70 cm
- Image 51.21 × 54.98 cm, 0.41× original. Margins 9.40 cm sides / 6.99 cm top / 8.03 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Both sheets are square; the picture inside them is slightly taller than wide
- Frame
- 50 × 50 cm and 70 × 70 cm are stocked square sizes across Europe. Nearest imperial: 20 × 20 in and 28 × 28 in
- Passepartout
- Not needed on the 70 × 70 — its printed margin is already 9.4 cm at the sides. On the 50 × 50 a mount works if you go one frame size up
- Glazing
- The picture is a dark interior with a lit glass roof; anti-reflective glazing keeps the room out of the shadows
Measure your frame before you order. Frame sizes vary between makers, and some frames have a rebate that swallows several millimetres on each side. We give the exact printed dimensions above so you can check; we cannot take responsibility for a frame that turns out not to fit.
All sheet records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions about this sheet: info@museartis.com