Claude Monet – Irises, 1914–17 | Giclée Print

Green from edge to edge, with violet irises running through it and no horizon anywhere. Monet painted this in his late seventies at Giverny, on a canvas two metres square, at the point where the garden stopped being a view and became a surface.

There is no ground and no sky. The Art Institute puts it plainly: the picture has no clear spatial markers. You are not standing in front of a flowerbed, you are inside one — or above water, which is the other reading the museum offers. Monet had been going blind with cataracts and painting bigger and bigger; what came out of it is closer to a wall than a window.

Found in the studio. The canvas stayed with Monet, passed to his son Michel at Giverny, and was still in the studio in the 1950s, damaged during the war. Katherine Kuh, then curator at the Art Institute, bought it in 1956 — because she saw in it what the American abstract painters of her own moment were doing. A picture from 1917 entered the museum as a contemporary argument.

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 twentieth-century painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 200.7 × 200 cm / 79 × 78.7 in — oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.21× original. Image 42.00 × 41.93 cm.

Why only one size. Chicago's photograph of this canvas runs 5,407 pixels across. At our 300 dpi floor that carries a print 45.8 cm wide and no further, and on a 70 × 70 sheet the picture would float in twelve centimetres of white on every side. One sheet, at the size the file honestly supports. If the museum ever rescans it larger, we will add the big square.

Provenance
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), Irises, 1914–17.
Oil on canvas; 200 × 200.7 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute Purchase Fund, acc. no. 1956.1202.
The artist; by descent to his son Michel Monet, Giverny; Katia Granoff, Paris, by 1956; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1956.
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.