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
- John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925), Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909
- Object
- Watercolour and opaque watercolour with scraping and wax resist over graphite on ivory wove paper, 35.6 × 50.8 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection
- Accession
- 1933.505 (object 14792), Department of Prints and Drawings
- File
- AIC IIIF, 6510 × 4628 px native
- Crop
- [92, 104, 6335, 4441] px, ratio 0.7010
- Printed at
- 383 dpi at 50 × 40 cm · 317 dpi at 70 × 50 cm
Which sheet, and why this one
Sargent spent the summer of 1909 on Corfu and worked almost entirely in watercolour — the medium he used when nobody was paying him to paint a portrait. This is one sheet from that summer: olive trunks, scraped highlights, and wax resist holding the paper white where the light comes through. Watercolours are unique objects, so there is no question of impressions or states.
The Coburns of Chicago owned it by May 1930 and gave it to the Art Institute in 1933. It was shown in the museum's 1930 watercolour loan exhibition and again in the 2018 Sargent retrospective.
What we measured
The sheet was photographed on a neutral studio ground reading luminance 149 on all four sides. We found the paper by counting, per column and per row, the pixels that are neither near-149 in luminance nor near-neutral in chroma: the fraction jumps from 0.01 to 0.97 between x 84 and x 92, falls away at x 6430; it rises from 0.02 to 0.91 between y 80 and y 104 and falls away at y 4548. Crop [92, 104, 6335, 4441].
That gives 0.7010 against the catalogued 35.6 / 50.8 = 0.7008 — agreement to 0.03 %, the closest in the catalogue.
The paper edge is slightly irregular, as a watercolour sheet's is and a trimmed print's is not. Our crop runs to the inner envelope of that edge: no studio grey anywhere on your print, at the cost of a few pixels of deckle.
A note for our own future source checks: the Art Institute's public API reports a thumbnail of 8000 × 6000 for this object. That is not the served image — the IIIF endpoint, which is what we print from, delivers 6510 × 4628. The thumbnail figure is never the working resolution.
Why the large sheet is 1:1
At 300 dpi, 6335 px cap the image at 53.6 cm wide. The original sheet is 50.8 cm — comfortably under that cap. So instead of pushing to the technical maximum we printed it at the size Sargent actually worked at, and chose the paper around it: 70 × 50 cm, leaving 9.60 cm at the sides.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Sargent died in 1925; the European term expired in 1996. In the United States the sheet was in a private collection and exhibited publicly in 1930, before the 1931 line — and in any case an unpublished work by an author who died in 1925 entered the US public domain in 1996. Free on either reading.
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, caption requested rather than required. File taken from the museum's own IIIF endpoint, not from an aggregator.
Our file. The crop, 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 × 40 cm
- Image 42.00 × 29.44 cm, 0.83× original. Margins 4.00 cm sides / 4.90 cm top / 5.65 cm bottom
- 70 × 50 cm
- Image 50.80 × 35.61 cm at original size, 1:1. Margins 9.60 cm sides / 6.70 cm top / 7.70 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Both sheets are landscape
- Frame
- A standard 50 × 40 cm or 70 × 50 cm frame takes the sheet as printed, no trimming. Nearest imperial: 20 × 16 in and 28 × 20 in
- Passepartout
- Not needed on the 70 × 50 — its printed side margin is already 9.6 cm. On the 50 × 40 a mount works if you go one frame size up
- Glazing
- UV filtering, without hesitation. Watercolour pigments are the most fugitive thing we print, and the original itself is kept in a Prints and Drawings department for exactly that reason
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