Between floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a tall pointed window pours blue moonlight onto a wooden desk, where an open book waits beside a brass lamp glowing under its green glass shade.
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Hang it in a home office, a reading corner or a hallway lined with books, against dark green, walnut brown, navy or warm grey walls, ideally above a desk or armchair.
Printable digital download, around 9,000 px on the long edge
The commercial licence covers hotels, offices, restaurants and public spaces
Print it yourself at any size, on metal, acrylic, glass or fine-art paper
On a Samsung Frame TV
Every download also includes a 3840 × 2160 file made for the Samsung Frame and other art-mode TVs: the whole work, uncropped, on a quiet mat in a colour taken from the picture. Send it to the TV with the SmartThings app and show it in Art Mode. All Frame TV art →
How large can I print it?
The file is around 9,000 px on the long edge. That prints crisply to about 75 cm on the long edge at gallery quality, and to 130–170 cm at the distance you look at a picture over furniture. Sizes, paper and framing, in detail →
Which paper or surface?
Gold on dark grounds wants a matte or satin fine-art paper (200–310 gsm), or aluminium for humid rooms; glossy photo paper turns the black into a mirror. The pale works also take satin and baryta papers.
Which licence do I need?
Personal (€9.99) covers your own home and gifts. Any business or space open to the public — a spa, clinic, hotel, office, restaurant — needs the commercial licence (€99.99, one venue, no renewal). The venue guide →
The room draws you straight in. Bookshelves rise on both sides like cliffs, and their lines run towards the tall pointed window in the centre, so the perspective carries the eye to the desk and the light behind it. Two kinds of light meet here: cool blue moonlight from the gothic window and warm gold from the lamp, the small candles and the sconces on the shelves. The green glass shade glows like a jewel where they cross. Below, the chair waits by the desk and books lie in piles on the floor, as if someone has just stepped away. Deep shadows fill the corners and give the space height. Close up you can explore the spines, the flames and the open page; from across the room the image reads as a calm, glowing refuge in the dark.
The lamp on the desk belongs to a type that is now shorthand for scholarly work. The green glass desk lamp on a brass stand goes back to a US patent filed in 1909 by Harrison D. McFaddin, whose Emeralite lamps soon became a fixture in banks, offices and libraries, which is why it is still called a banker's lamp. The shade was typically green glass on the outside with a pale lining inside, so that it threw light down onto the page while keeping the bulb out of the reader's sight. Pairing such a lamp with a gothic window mixes centuries freely, but that blend of old architecture and practical study light is exactly the atmosphere of the picture.
The Astronomer's Desk makes a natural partner, two night scenes where warm light holds back the dark. For a touch of colour in the same green, The Emerald Lily works well in a nearby bedroom or hall. Dark walls make the room in the picture feel like an extension of your own: deep green, walnut, navy or slate. A dark wood frame suits the shelves, and a thin gold one picks up the lamplight. A cream mat helps on pale walls. It reads well from a distance, so it can go large, above a sofa or at a corridor's end. Printed from the 7168 × 10752 px file, the print holds its detail to about 60 × 90 cm. Included as well: a Frame TV version with a gallery mat.
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