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, 7.05 cm above, 8.13 cm below.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 5.86 cm each side, 7.24 cm above, 8.32 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 × 24.22 cm for the small sheet, 57.69 × 33.84 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), Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), 1890–91
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 60 × 100.5 cm. Inscribed lower left: Claude Monet 91
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Arthur M. Wood, Sr. in memory of Pauline Palmer Wood
- Inventory
- 1985.1103
- 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
Two stacks of threshed wheat stand in a field just outside Monet's farmhouse at Giverny, the larger one near, the smaller one further off, with a line of poplars, a low hill and the roofs of the village behind. The light comes low from the left at the end of a summer day. The shadows are not grey: they run blue and violet across the stubble, and the stacks themselves are built from rose, orange and green strokes laid side by side.
The Art Institute points out something that separates the autumn pictures from the winter ones: here the conical tops of the stacks break the horizon and push into the sky, while in most of the winter canvases the stacks sit wrapped in bands of hill and field. Put this sheet beside our Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) and you can see it happen.
Number one in May 1891
In May 1891 Monet hung fifteen of these canvases side by side in one small room at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. It was an unprecedented critical and financial success and the turning point of his career. This canvas was number one in the catalogue, listed as Meules (Fin de l'été).
Durand-Ruel bought it from Monet on 9 May, during the show, and sold it in June to Charles Fairchild of Boston. In August Fairchild handed it back in exchange for another Monet, a cliff at Pourville now in Stockholm, and on the same day Durand-Ruel sold it to Potter Palmer of Chicago. It stayed in the Palmer family for almost a century before coming to the Art Institute, which today holds the largest group of Monet's Stacks of Wheat in the world. Our snow canvas came from the same collector.
Why the large sheet stops at 0.58×
The museum catalogues the canvas at 60 × 100.5 cm and serves a file of 6,884 × 4,068 px, the full native file. Anchored on the catalogued width, as everywhere in this catalogue, that is 68.50 px/cm, or 174 dpi if the picture were printed at original size. Well below our floor of 300 dpi, so there is no 1:1 sheet, and there will not be one until a larger file exists.
At exactly 300 dpi the file carries 58.29 cm of image width, 0.58× 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; the file stops half a centimetre short, so the file wins. A 100 cm sheet would only have added white paper.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.42× original, with 416 dpi available.
One small wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.6923, the catalogued dimensions give 1.6750, which is 1.03 % apart. Anchored on the width, the printed height corresponds to 59.4 cm of canvas instead of 60. The likeliest explanation is the usual one for a canvas photographed in its frame — a few millimetres of paint 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 border, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in. Medians: top 163 and 169 across a range of 135 to 201, bottom 128 and 121 across 96 to 164, left 131 and 156 across 86 to 180, right 133 and 138 across 103 to 200. 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 and sold in 1891, long before 1930.
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 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 × 142 px: 86.8 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that warm tones account for 61.3 %, blue 21.9 %, green 12.8 %, violet 4.0 %. Raising the saturation threshold to 0.15 lifts the warm share to 70.2 %, at 0.25 to 81.9 % — the warm light is the picture, not a ground. Filed under Warm Tones.
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.