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
- Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières), 1887
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 60 cm
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Charles Deering McCormick, Brooks McCormick and Roger McCormick
- Accession
- 1965.1169 (object 109314)
- File
- AIC IIIF, 10057 × 8391 px native
- Crop
- None — deliberately untrimmed, see below
- Printed at
- 634 dpi at 50 × 40 cm · 507 dpi at 70 × 50 cm
Which painting, and why this one
The Seine at the Pont de Clichy, near Asnières north of Paris, painted in the spring of 1887 while Van Gogh was working alongside Paul Signac. The museum's own entry names divisionism as the influence: small strokes of unmixed colour left to combine in the eye rather than on the palette. This is Van Gogh before Arles, learning the thing he would later push much further.
Provenance: Johanna van Gogh-Bonger; Cornelis Hoogendijk in The Hague; family collections in Amsterdam and Switzerland; Knoedler & Co. to Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick of Chicago in May 1947; given to the Art Institute in 1965.
What we measured — and a decision we want you to know about
The canvas carries a red-brown ground, and along all four edges that ground is bare where the paint stops. We measured it as the fraction of red pixels per column and row: 0.90 at the left edge, falling away by x 120; 0.99 at the right, falling away by x 9916; 0.93 at the top, gone by y 114; 0.76–0.83 at the bottom, still 0.44 at y 8290.
We did not trim it. That red is the painting's own ground — part of the object — not a studio background. Where we do trim, as on our Sargent watercolour with its grey studio ground, we are removing the photograph; here we would be removing the painting. Our house rule is that we reproduce and do not retouch, so the reddish line prints. If you see it on your sheet, it is meant to be there.
A second argument settled it: a trim to the painted field would have given [125, 118, 9785, 8107], ratio 0.8285 — further from the catalogued 0.8417 than leaving the file alone. As printed, 8391 / 10057 = 0.83434, which is 0.87 % off the catalogue, the range that rounding and the canvas turnover edges explain.
Both sheets are height-bound: the canvas at 0.834 is taller than our 0.80 and 0.714 papers, so the vertical margin is set to the house measure and the sides come out wider — 4.87 cm and 9.83 cm.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Van Gogh died in 1890; the European term expired in 1961. Painted in 1887, so public domain in the US as well.
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 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 40.27 × 33.60 cm, 0.67× original. Margins 4.87 cm sides / 2.98 cm top / 3.42 cm bottom
- 70 × 50 cm
- Image 50.34 × 42.00 cm, 0.84× original. Margins 9.83 cm sides / 3.73 cm top / 4.28 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 9.8 cm. On the 50 × 40 a mount works if you go one frame size up
- Glazing
- UV filtering. The blues and greens of a divisionist surface depend on staying in balance with each other; fading one shifts the whole picture
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