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
- Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Irises, 1914–17
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 200 × 200.7 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute Purchase Fund
- Accession
- 1956.1202 (object 4887)
- File
- AIC IIIF, 5407 × 5398 px native
- Crop
- None — the whole file is printed
- Printed at
- 327 dpi at 50 × 50 cm
Which painting, and why this one
A two-metre canvas from the late Giverny years, painted while Monet's sight was failing and the war was on. There are no spatial markers in it at all — no bank, no sky, no horizon — which the museum's own entry points out. You cannot tell how far away anything is.
It stayed in the studio. Monet died in 1926, the canvas passed to his son Michel at Giverny, and it was found there in the 1950s after wartime damage. Katia Granoff had it in Paris by 1956, and the Art Institute's curator Katherine Kuh bought it that year — reading it, plausibly, against the abstract expressionism happening around her at the time. Its arrival in a public collection is thirty years later than most of the paintings we print.
What we measured
We profiled five columns and rows at each edge of a 2400 px rendition: means 95–96 left, 103–104 right, 111–116 top, 87–88 bottom, spreads 67 to 193. Painted surface on every edge, no studio ground, no frame. Nothing trimmed. Ratio 5398 / 5407 = 0.99834 against the catalogued 200 / 200.7 = 0.99651 — 0.18 %.
Why there is only one size
Resolution, plainly. 5407 px at 300 dpi carry an image of at most 45.8 cm. Our 50 × 50 cm sheet prints it at 42 cm, which is 327 dpi and comfortable. A 70 × 70 cm sheet would leave 12.1 cm of white on every side — that is not a border, it is a picture floating in a field, and we would rather not sell it than upscale to fill the paper.
If the Art Institute ever rescans this canvas at a higher resolution, the second size goes in.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Monet died in 1926; the European term expired in 1997. In the United States the canvas was unpublished — it sat in the studio until the 1950s — so it entered the public domain in 1997 under life plus seventy. It does not rest on the 1931 publication line at all.
The digitisation. The Art Institute of Chicago releases it under Creative Commons Zero (CC0); its API reports is_public_domain: true and an empty copyright notice for this object. Commercial use expressly permitted. 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 42.00 × 41.93 cm, 0.21× original. Margins 4.00 cm sides / 3.75 cm top / 4.32 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Square. One format only
- Frame
- 50 × 50 cm is a stocked square size across Europe. Nearest imperial: 20 × 20 in
- Passepartout
- Optional. The printed border already gives the sheet air. If you want a mount as well, go one frame size up rather than cutting into the border
- Glazing
- UV filtering — the violets in the irises are the first thing daylight takes out
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