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 4.00 cm each side, 2.79 cm above, 3.20 cm below.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 7.67 cm each side, 2.67 cm above, 3.07 cm 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 × 33.41 cm for the small sheet, 54.06 × 43.66 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Massif de chrysanthèmes (Bed of Chrysanthemums), 1897
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 81.7 × 100.5 cm. Signed and dated lower left: Claude Monet 97
- Held by
- Kunstmuseum Basel, deposit of the Dr. h.c. Emile Dreyfus Foundation
- Inventory
- G 1970.11
- Rights
- Marked by the museum as public-domain image data («Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel»), free for any use including commercial
- File
- Kunstmuseum Basel, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four borders of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
- Source
- Claude Monet, Massif de chrysanthèmes, in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online, sammlung.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/collection/item/1481, accessed 25 September 2026
The picture Monet made
There is no horizon in this picture and nowhere to stand. Monet looks down into a bed of chrysanthemums and lets it fill the canvas to every edge: great shaggy heads of pink and white on the left and at the bottom right, rust-red and crimson ones across the top, and a scatter of spidery yellow blooms tipped with red floating in the dark between them. The ground is not soil but a deep blue-green, laid in with curling strokes that repeat the shapes of the petals.
Chrysanthemums flower in autumn, and the museum dates the group to the autumn of 1897. The signature and date, Claude Monet 97, sit in the lower left corner, painted into the orange blooms.
Four canvases and a tapestry
This is one of four chrysanthemum pictures that Monet painted that season and showed together in June 1898 at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Looking at how flat the compositions are — flowers spread across the surface rather than arranged in depth — the critic Gustave Geffroy wrote in his review of an «effet de tapisserie», a tapestry effect.
The phrase has stuck, because it points forward. In 2022 the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris included this canvas in Le décor impressionniste. Aux sources des nymphéas, an exhibition about the decorative ambitions that led to Monet's water lilies. Put this sheet beside our Water Lilies, 1906 and the family resemblance is plain: no sky, no edge, the picture as a surface.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.54×
The museum catalogues the canvas at 81.7 × 100.5 cm and serves a file of 6,456 × 5,228 px. Anchored on the catalogued width, as everywhere in this catalogue, that is 64.24 px/cm, or 163 dpi if the picture were printed at original size. Well below our floor of 300 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 54.66 cm of image width, 0.54× the canvas. That is what the 70 × 50 cm sheet prints, one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print, with no scaling at all. Our house rule would have put the image at 84 % of the sheet width, 58.80 cm — but the canvas is almost square by landscape standards, close to 5 : 4, and at that width its height would not even fit the sheet. The file sets the size, and the white goes to the sides.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.42× original, with 390 dpi available.
A small wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.2349, the catalogued dimensions give 1.2301, which is 0.39 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height corresponds to 81.4 cm of canvas instead of 81.7 — three millimetres, well within what a canvas photographed in its frame loses to the rebate. That is a supposition, not a measurement, and we do not stretch the file to close the gap.
What we measured at the edges
Before printing a museum file whole we check that it really is the picture and not the picture plus a photographer's backdrop. Forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in. Medians: top 140 and 132 across a range of 20 to 238, bottom 104 and 108 across 9 to 225, left 91 and 75 across 21 to 206, right 128 and 129 across 29 to 215. Every border varies from sample to sample, as painted canvas does and a studio ground does not. Nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Monet died on 5 December 1926, so the painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 1997, and in the United States as a work exhibited in Paris in 1898, long before 1930.
At the reproduction level the Kunstmuseum Basel marks this object as public-domain image data and allows it to be shared, used for any purpose — commercial included — and edited, without asking. The painting is a flat work, so in none of our markets does a separate right arise in the photograph. The museum asks that the artist, title and source be named with a link, and that its logo never be used; both are done above. The museum is our source, not our partner. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States. Clear in all four.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 194 px: 96.8 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that blue accounts for 41.2 %, warm tones 30.9 %, violet 26.9 %, green 1.0 %. Raising the saturation threshold to 0.15 and 0.25 barely moves the split. No hue carries the picture on its own: the blue is the dark ground between the flowers, and the flowers divide between warm and violet. Filed under Paintings, not under a colour.
Which size: the small sheet is a picture for a desk wall or a stair, read from a metre away. The large one wants a wall above a sideboard or a bed, and it is the size at which the file is printed pixel for pixel.