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, 3.57 cm above and below.
- 100 × 75 cm sheet
- A 100 × 75 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 30 in. Margins 12.23 cm each side, 7.95 cm above and below — wider than usual, and the reason is given 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 × 32.26 cm for the small sheet, 74.95 × 58.51 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), Sandvika, Norway, 1895
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 73.4 × 92.5 cm. Inscribed lower left: Claude Monet 95
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Bruce Borland
- Inventory
- 1961.790
- Rights
- CC0 — the museum places both the work and its photograph in the public domain
- File
- Art Institute of Chicago, 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.
The picture Monet made
A bridge crosses the river at Sandvika, a village outside Christiania — the city is Oslo now — and behind it the village roofs sit under snow, with a mountain rising into a sky barely a shade lighter than itself. The picture is built out of two or three long horizontals and one dark diagonal, the bridge, which is the only line in it that goes anywhere.
The snow is not white. Look at the foreground: it is laid in pink, lilac and pale blue, with the white kept for a few strokes on the roofs. That is the whole argument of the campaign Monet was on — that snow has no colour of its own and takes whatever the light is doing that hour.
Two months, twenty-nine canvases
Monet went to Norway in the winter of 1895 to stay with his stepson Jacques Hoschedé, who lived in Christiania. The Art Institute describes it as perhaps the most physically taxing of all his painting campaigns: he was awestruck by the country and at first could not find a motif in all that snow. He came home after two months with twenty-nine canvases, at least six of them views of Sandvika. The museum adds a suggestion we like too much not to pass on: the iron bridge here may have reminded him of the Japanese bridge in his own garden at Giverny.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.82×
The museum catalogues the canvas at 73.4 × 92.5 cm and serves a file of 8,923 × 6,981 px — the full native file, with no cap. Taking the catalogued width as the anchor, as we do everywhere in this catalogue, that is 96.46 px/cm, or 245 dpi if the picture were printed at original size. Below our floor of 300 dpi. So there is no 1:1 sheet here, and there will not be one until a larger file exists.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 75.55 cm of image width, which is 0.82× the canvas. That is what the 100 × 75 cm sheet prints, pixel for pixel: one pixel of the museum's file to one pixel of the print, no scaling at all. Our house rule would have put the image at 84 % of the sheet width, 84.00 cm; the file does not reach it, so the file wins and the margins come out wider. We would rather show you a wide white border than an interpolated picture.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.45× original, with 540 dpi available.
One honest wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.2782, the catalogued dimensions give 1.2602, which is 1.43 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height comes out about a centimetre shorter than the catalogued 73.4 cm. The likeliest explanation is the ordinary one for a stretched canvas photographed in its frame — a few millimetres of paint sit under the rebate at top and bottom — but 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 of the four borders, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in: the top averages RGB 188/188/191 across a range of 153 to 207, the bottom 208/204/200 across 170 to 223, the left 176/180/184 across 80 to 223, the right 180/175/175 across 138 to 211. Every border varies from sample to sample. A studio ground does not — in the Mondrian lozenge elsewhere in this catalogue it sits at a constant RGB 235. The pale, even-looking bottom edge here is the snow in the foreground. 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 published long before 1930. There is no open question of the kind that keeps other twentieth-century painters off this catalogue.
At the reproduction level the Art Institute of Chicago publishes the object under CC0 and serves the full-resolution file openly through its IIIF endpoint, with no cap and no separate claim in the photograph. 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 × 188 px: 58.2 % of the pixels carry colour at all, and within that blue accounts for 79.5 %, warm tones 9.0 %, violet 7.6 %. We then ran the test we apply to every painting — whether the dominant colour is really the painted ground rather than the picture. Raising the saturation threshold from 0.06 to 0.15 leaves blue at 87.3 %, and at 0.25 it is still 73.5 %. The blue survives every threshold. It is the snow, and the snow is the picture. Tagged Colour: Blue.
Which size: the small sheet is a picture for a desk wall or a stair, read from a metre away. The large one is the picture at close to the size Monet painted it, and it wants a wall you can stand back from — at 0.82× the brushmarks in the snow come out at nearly the width his brush left them.