Sheet record — Water Lilies (Claude Monet, 1906)

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.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, oil on canvas, 1906
The sheet as we print it — the canvas edge to edge, inside a white border.

The sheet you have

Work
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Water Lilies, 1906
Object
Oil on canvas, 89.9 × 94.1 cm
Held by
Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection
Accession
1933.1157 (object 16568)
File
AIC IIIF, 8000 × 7684 px used (native 8808 × 8460)
Crop
None — the whole file is printed
Printed at
345 dpi at 70 × 70 cm · 484 dpi at 50 × 50 cm

Which painting, and why this one

Monet painted the lily pond at Giverny well over two hundred times, and "Water Lilies" on a label tells you almost nothing on its own. This is the 1906 canvas in Chicago, from the group where he had stopped painting the pond as a place — no bank, no bridge, no horizon — and started painting only the surface: reflected sky, reflected willow, and the pads sitting on top of both. It is the moment the series turns from landscape into something with no ground in it at all.

The Ryersons bought it and left it to the Art Institute in 1933.

What we measured

All four edges of the file are painted surface. We sampled the edge rows and columns and found means around RGB 80/108/116 with no uniform background band — no studio floor, no stretcher, nothing to trim. So there is no crop: the whole file is printed edge to edge.

The file's ratio is 1.0411 against the museum's catalogued 94.1 / 89.9 = 1.0467, a 0.5 % agreement. The canvas is near-square, so the sheet is square.

We used the 8000 px rendition rather than the native 8808 px; at our sizes that gives 345 and 484 dpi, both well above our 300 dpi floor. No upscaling.

What we are allowed to sell

The original. Monet died in 1926; the European term expired on 1 January 1997. Painted and exhibited before 1930, so public domain in the US as well.

The digitisation. The Art Institute of Chicago releases images of its public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0); its API reports is_public_domain: true for this object. Commercial use is expressly permitted and a caption is requested rather than required — this record carries it. 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

70 × 70 cm
Image 58.80 × 56.48 cm, 0.62× original. Margins 5.60 cm sides / 6.29 cm top / 7.23 cm bottom
50 × 50 cm
Image 42.00 × 40.34 cm, 0.45× original. Margins 4.00 cm sides / 4.49 cm top / 5.17 cm bottom
Orientation
Both sheets are square
Frame
50 × 50 cm and 70 × 70 cm are stocked square sizes across Europe. Nearest imperial: 20 × 20 in and 28 × 28 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 is worth it — the pinks and violets in the pads are the first thing daylight takes out of a print

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.


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