Carl Blechen – The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel, 1834 | Giclée Print

Palms under glass, a shaft of daylight down the middle of the house, and figures in silk arranged among the leaves as if they were part of the planting. Carl Blechen painted this in 1834, for the king who had built the glasshouse.

The building is gone. Karl Friedrich Schinkel's palm house stood on the Pfaueninsel, an island in the Havel below Potsdam. Friedrich Wilhelm III had it put up in the early 1830s to hold the Foulchiron palm collection, bought in Paris on Alexander von Humboldt's advice. It burned down in 1880. Blechen's paintings are among the few records of what the inside of it looked like.

It is a room, not a landscape. That is what makes it hang so well. The picture has a floor, a ceiling, columns and a path running away from you — the structure of an interior — and it is filled edge to edge with green. Hung in a room, it works the way a window onto a garden works, which is more or less what the palm house was built to be.

A note on the figures. The women in Indian dress are Blechen's invention rather than a record of anything on the island. The house was fitted out with Indian motifs, and he dressed the figures in textiles that echo them, treating the people as an extension of the decor — the Art Institute says as much in its own catalogue entry. It is a European fantasy of the tropics, painted in a Prussian greenhouse, and worth seeing as that.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Art Institute of Chicago's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a nineteenth-century painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 135 × 126 cm / 53.1 × 49.6 in — oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.31× original. Image 39.10 × 42.00 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.41× original. Image 51.21 × 54.98 cm.

Why the large sheet has wider side margins. The canvas is almost square, a little taller than it is wide. On the 70 × 70 sheet the picture is set to exactly 300 dpi — the house floor for a giclée — and that fixes its width at 51.2 cm. The border then comes out at 9.4 cm at the sides against 7.0 cm at the top. Taking the picture wider would mean enlarging the museum's file beyond its own resolution, which we don't do.

Provenance
Carl Blechen (German, 1798–1840), The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, 1834.
Oil on canvas; 135 × 126 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, acc. no. 1996.388.
Painted for Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, who paid the artist 1000 Taler; probably given by him to his daughter Charlotte, as Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna; in a Swiss collection by about 1920; to the Art Institute in 1996.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.