Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Vincent van Gogh – The Poet’s Garden, 1888 | Giclée Print

50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Reduced, 0.46× original
CHF 59.00
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Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Vincent van Gogh, The Poet's Garden, 1888 — the painting reproduced whole: a grove of green trees over tall flowering grass under a heavy yellow sky
  • Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as an 80 × 60 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at print size: the chrome-yellow sky laid in flat strokes against the dark green treeline
  • Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Vincent van Gogh, The Poet's Garden, 1888 — the painting reproduced whole: a grove of green trees over tall flowering grass under a heavy yellow sky
  • Van Gogh's The Poet's Garden as an 80 × 60 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at print size: the chrome-yellow sky laid in flat strokes against the dark green treeline
Vincent van Gogh – The Poet’s Garden, 1888 | Giclée Print

Vincent van Gogh – The Poet’s Garden, 1888 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A garden filling the whole canvas: tall grass with white flowers in front, a grove of bushes and trees behind, and above them a sky that is not blue but yellow-green. There is no horizon to speak of and almost nothing that is not foliage. Measured pixel by pixel, this is the greenest sheet in the shop.

The poet is Gauguin. Van Gogh painted the public garden across the square from the Yellow House in Arles, in September 1888, for the room he was preparing for Paul Gauguin — the poet of the title — whose arrival he had been waiting for all summer. The Art Institute says exactly this in its own catalogue entry. The room was furnished, the walls were hung with pictures of this garden, and the friendship lasted nine weeks.

The sky is the daring part. Van Gogh puts a heavy chrome-yellow sky over a green garden and lets the two fight. It is the same argument he was making in his letters that autumn: that a colour is not there to describe the thing, it is there to do something to the colour beside it. Cover the sky with your hand and the picture goes quiet.

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: 92.1 × 73 cm / 36.3 × 28.7 in — oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.46× original. Image 42.00 × 33.18 cm.
80 × 60 cm / 31.5 × 23.6 in — reduced, 0.69× original. Image 63.80 × 50.39 cm.

Why the borders are wider at the sides. The canvas is a little taller in proportion than our sheets are, so on both sizes the picture is set by the height of the sheet and the side borders come out wider than the top and bottom. On the large sheet that is 8.1 cm at the sides against 4.5 at the top. Making the picture wider would push it off the sheet, not off the resolution: Chicago's file carries 12,637 pixels across, enough for a print 107 cm wide at our 300 dpi floor. Here the paper is the limit, for once, and not the file.

Provenance
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), The Poet's Garden, 1888.
Oil on canvas; 73 × 92.1 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, acc. no. 1933.433.
From the artist's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger through several European galleries; with Mrs Lewis Larned Coburn, Chicago, by 1928; bequeathed to the Art Institute in 1933.
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.

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