The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 9.90 cm each side, 7.20 cm top and bottom.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 16.97 cm each side, 9.72 cm top and bottom. The margins are wide on this sheet by design — the file allows 1.19× and no more, and we would rather give the picture air than enlarge past what the file holds.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 29.60 × 25.00 cm for the small sheet, 35.46 × 29.96 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- John Constable (British, 1776–1837), Cloud Study, 1821
- Object
- Oil on paper, laid on board, 24.8 × 30.2 cm
- Held by
- Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection
- Inventory
- B1981.25.156
- File
- The museum’s own IIIF service, at 4260 × 3610 px
- Crop
- None by us. The museum’s file is already cropped to the painted surface; we print it whole.
The picture Constable made
No horizon, no landscape, no place — only sky. Constable set his board down on Hampstead Heath on the afternoon of 13 September 1821 and painted what was over his head: a bank of cloud breaking up, warm grey against blue, laid in fast with a loaded brush. On the back he wrote what he had seen — the hour, the wind, and the weather that followed. He did this for every study of that autumn. It is a painter keeping a weather record.
This is the first of the studies with no horizon line at all. September was his month: he thought its skies had a peculiar tone and beauty, and he spent two autumns on the Heath proving it.
What we checked in the file
Two things had to be ruled out before printing. First, that the photograph shows the painted surface and not a mount. A 30-pixel strip read along each of the four edges gives a full tonal range on every side, from near black to near white — a card border, a mount or a photographic ground would show as a uniform light or dark strip, and there is none. Second, that we had the right image at all: the museum’s manifest also holds a framed photograph with a colour target (8070 × 6772 px), the verso, and an X-radiograph. The panel is the first canvas in the manifest, and that is the one we print.
Colour, measured from the file at 400 × 339 px: mean RGB 140 / 135 / 131. Red exceeds blue by nine points, 23.4 % of the pixels read as unambiguously warm and only 2.1 % as blue. The storm mass is a brown-violet grey; the lit edges run to cream.
Why the small sheet is 1:1, and why its height runs 3.1 % long
The museum catalogues the picture at 24.8 × 30.2 cm. The file measures 4260 × 3610 px, a ratio of 1.1801 against 1.2177 for the catalogued dimensions — 3.1 % apart. Read as anchors, that is 141.06 px/cm across the width and 145.56 px/cm down the height.
We take the catalogued width as the anchor, as everywhere in this catalogue. The 50 × 40 cm sheet therefore prints the picture 30.20 cm wide: original size, 1:1, at 358 dpi. Its printed height comes out 25.60 cm against the catalogued 24.8. The likely reason — and we give it as a supposition, not a fact — is that the tape measure went round the backing board while the camera saw the paper mounted on it. We could close the gap by squeezing the file 3.1 % in one direction. We do not, because that would make the picture wrong in order to make a number right.
The 70 × 50 cm sheet prints the picture 36.06 cm wide — 1.19× original, and that is the ceiling: 4260 px at 300 dpi are exactly 36.06 cm. Past that the print would fall below 300 dpi, so the sheet stops there and the margins take the rest.
What we are allowed to sell
Constable died on 31 March 1837, so the painting has been in the public domain everywhere we sell since 1907 — seventy years after his death in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom, and as a work long predating 1930 in the United States.
At the reproduction level, the Yale Center for British Art marks the object Public Domain and serves the full-resolution file through its IIIF endpoint under Creative Commons CC0 1.0, asserting no additional rights in the photograph. Checked 10 September 2026.
Printed by Gelato on 200 gsm fine art giclée paper with pigment inks. A reproduction, not an oil painting, and not sold as one.