Sheet record — Irises (Vincent van Gogh, 1889)

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.

Vincent van Gogh, Irises, oil on canvas, 1889
The sheet as we print it — the canvas edge to edge, inside a white border.

The sheet you have

Work
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Irises, 1889
Object
Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 94.3 cm. Painted at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, May 1889
Held by
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Accession
90.PA.20
File
Getty IIIF, 9021 × 7122 px native
Crop
None — the whole file is printed
Printed at
359 dpi at 80 × 60 cm · 545 dpi at 50 × 40 cm

Which painting, and why this one

Van Gogh painted this in his first week at the asylum at Saint-Rémy, in May 1889, working in the walled garden. He called it a lightning conductor for his illness. There is no preparatory drawing: he went at the canvas directly, and the single white iris at the left is the only one that breaks the blue.

The Getty bought it in 1990, after the 1987 sale that made it briefly the most expensive painting in the world — a fact that says nothing about the picture and everything about 1987.

What we measured

All four edges of the file are painted surface — greens and ochres, high variance, no uniform band that would indicate studio ground or a stretcher edge. So there is no crop: the whole file is printed. The file's ratio is 1.2666 against the museum's catalogued 94.3 / 74.3 = 1.2692, a 0.2 % agreement.

One honest note about the large sheet. The canvas is 1.267 wide to tall; our 50 × 40 cm sheet is 1.250, near enough that the borders come out at the house 8 %. The 80 × 60 cm sheet is 1.333 — wider than the picture. We set the vertical margins to the house measure and let the sides fall where they fall, which is 8.08 cm. We did not crop the painting to fit the paper, and we did not stretch it.

What we are allowed to sell

The original. Van Gogh died in 1890; the European term expired long ago. Painted and exhibited in 1889, so public domain in the US as well.

The digitisation. The J. Paul Getty Museum publishes photographs of its public-domain works through the Open Content Program — usable without restriction or fee, commercially or not, no attribution required. The object's rights display name in Getty's Linked Art record is "Public Domain", and the IIIF service delivers the full 9021 px, which is how Getty serves Open Content images (restricted ones are capped). File taken from the museum's own 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

80 × 60 cm
Image 63.84 × 50.40 cm, 0.68× original. Margins 8.08 cm sides / 4.47 cm top / 5.13 cm bottom
50 × 40 cm
Image 42.00 × 33.16 cm, 0.45× original. Margins 4.00 cm sides / 3.18 cm top / 3.66 cm bottom
Orientation
Both sheets are landscape
Frame
A standard 80 × 60 cm or 50 × 40 cm frame takes the sheet as printed, no trimming. Nearest imperial: 32 × 24 in and 20 × 16 in
Passepartout
Optional, and least needed on the 80 × 60, whose printed side margins are already 8 cm. If you want a mount, go one frame size up rather than cutting into the border
Glazing
UV filtering. The violet-blue of the irises is exactly the range that fades first

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