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.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944), Farm near Duivendrecht, c. 1916
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 86.3 × 107.9 cm
- Held by
- The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Dolly J. van der Hoop Schoenberg
- Accession
- 2001.479 (AIC object 144467)
- Catalogue
- Joosten and Welsh, vol. 2, no. C8. Older literature calls it Landscape with Farmhouse and dates it 1906.
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 12504 × 9934 px, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The whole file is printed.
- Printed at
- 50 × 40 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 33.37 cm, 0.39× — 756 dpi available
80 × 60 cm sheet: image 63.44 × 50.40 cm, 0.59× — 501 dpi available
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. Nothing enlarged in software. - Made in
- The certified house nearest your address, to one specification: 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, same colour profile, same border geometry.
Why a Mondrian looks like this
Because he painted it twice over, ten years apart. Mondrian first drew the farm at Duivendrecht, just south-east of Amsterdam, around 1905. He kept returning to the motif — some twenty works are known — and nine of them were made during the First World War, at the very moment his other work was pushing hardest into Cubism. The reason is not mystical. The war stranded him in the Netherlands, and the patrons he had there wanted the naturalistic pictures and would not buy the experiments. So he painted the farm again.
That is why the canvas has two clocks running in it. The subject belongs to 1905; the handling belongs to 1916. The bare trees have flattened into a lattice laid over the sky, the reflection is composed as a second picture rather than as an echo of the first, and the colour is set down in planes. It is a Cubist's eye spent on a farmhouse, and it is the last place most people would look for the man who was about to spend a decade on three colours and a grid.
What we measured
The museum catalogues the canvas at 86.3 × 107.9 cm, a ratio of 1.2503. The file is 12504 × 9934 pixels, a ratio of 1.2587. The two differ by 0.67 %, which is less than a stretched canvas moves on its own, so the catalogued figures stand as the anchor and nothing was corrected to make the numbers agree. We record the discrepancy rather than quietly splitting the difference.
Why nothing is cropped
Almost every painting we print arrives with a margin of photographer's backdrop around it, and the first job is to find the edge of the canvas and cut there. Not here. We sampled ten bands along each of the four sides and took the median of each: on the left they run 143 to 173, on the right 119 to 206, along the top 152 to 194, along the bottom 135 to 165. Every band is painted. There is no flat, uniform light ground anywhere at the margin — which is exactly what a studio backdrop looks like when you measure it, as on our Mondrian lozenge, where the corners read a constant 235.
So Mondrian painted to all four edges, the museum photographed the canvas edge to edge, and any crop at all would remove paint. The file is placed whole on both sheets. This is the first painting in the catalogue printed that way.
Why the border is measured differently on the two sheets
The picture is 1.259 wide to high. The small sheet is 1.25 and the large one is 1.333, so the same rule gives two different answers. On the 50 × 40 sheet the width binds: our standard 84 % of the sheet is 42.00 cm of image, and the height that follows, 33.37 cm, still leaves proper margins above and below. On the 80 × 60 sheet it does not — 84 % of 80 cm would be 67.2 cm of image, which is 53.4 cm high against an allowance of 50.4 — so the height binds instead and the width follows at 63.44 cm. The same thing happened on our Van Gogh Poet's Garden, which has almost exactly this ratio.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Mondrian died in 1944, so in Switzerland, the EU and the UK the seventy-year term ran out on 1 January 2015. The United States runs on a different rule. So far as anyone can show, the painting was never published in the copyright sense before 1978, and an unpublished work by an author who died in 1944 falls under 17 U.S.C. 303(a): life plus seventy, with a floor at the end of 2002. It has been free in the United States since 1 January 2003. That is also the Art Institute's own determination, and it is the determination we rely on.
What we do not claim: we have not established a date of first publication for this canvas and we do not assert one. If it were held to have been published before 1978, a restored term of 95 years from that date would apply and the picture could still be protected in the United States. We would rather name that branch than leave a tidier sentence we cannot prove. Our house rule is that no Mondrian painted after 1930 enters this catalogue, and that the holding museum must itself declare the work public domain. Both conditions are met here.
The photograph. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes images of public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero, for any purpose including commercial use; a caption is requested, not required, and it is on the product page. Unlike our lozenge, this canvas was photographed square on with no stretcher depth showing on any edge, so it is a flat copy of a flat original and no photographer's right arises anywhere we ship, quite apart from the museum's waiver.
What we do not claim. This is a giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.
A note on colour
Measured by our own method, 81 % of the sheet carries colour and 96 % of that colour is warm. It carries no colour tag all the same. The warmth is spread across pink, apricot, ochre, brick and brown, and there is no single hue anyone could search for and be satisfied by. Our colour collections are Blue and Green; neither is close.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 3.08 above, 3.54 below.
- 80 × 60 cm sheet
- An 80 × 60 cm frame. Nearest standard 32 × 24 in. Margins 8.28 cm each side, 4.47 above, 5.13 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 32.77 cm for the small sheet, 62.84 × 49.80 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com