Notes

Scale diagram at one scale: Manet's 196 x 108 cm canvas of the 1867 Exposition Universelle beside its prints at 0.43x and 0.30x, and Constable's Cloud Study beside its prints at 1:1 and 1.19x
True to Scale: How We Measure a Work Before We Print It
Every Museartis print is either the work at its original size or the work at a stated fraction of it. Here is how we measure, using Manet's view of the... Read more...
Rembrandt's The Three Trees as a giclée print at the original plate size, unframed, hung above a sideboard in a domestic interior
The Radical Act of Hanging a Copy on Your Wall
In an art world driven by market hype and museum crowds, living with a meticulously crafted reproduction isn't a compromise. It might be the purest way to actually see. Read more...
Rembrandt, The Three Trees, 1643 — the etching reproduced whole to the platemark
What a Reproduction Was For
A reproduction of Rembrandt's Three Trees, inherited from a great-uncle, and the argument it makes: reproductions were once an instrument of education, nobody apologised for them, and the thing that... Read more...
A papyrus fragment with lines from Homer's Odyssey, written in Egypt around 285–250 BCE, shown whole and in detail
A Papyrus We Cannot Print
The Metropolitan Museum has a fragment of the Odyssey written around 285–250 BCE. We measured it as a print and decided against it — here is the arithmetic, and what... Read more...
Diagram of the five layers in a framed print: glazing, mat or spacer, the sheet, backing board, and the moulding with a sealed back
The Frame We Don't Sell
Every print leaves here rolled in a tube, unframed. That is a decision, and it hands you a job. This is how to do that job properly — which measurement... Read more...
The same detail of Hokusai's Great Wave printed at 300 dpi and at 156 dpi, side by side — the lower resolution is visibly soft
Why This Print Is Not Bigger
Every size in this shop is decided by the source file, not by what would sell best. Here is the arithmetic behind that — what 300 dpi really measures, why... Read more...
A woman in a long coat walking away across a snow-covered paddock, a dark horse galloping behind her — photograph attributed to Félix Thiollier, 1899
Two Dates That Decide
A work can be in the public domain in Europe and still under copyright in the United States. The two systems use different rules — death of the maker in... Read more...
Detail of Albrecht Dürer's 1515 woodcut: the rhinoceros's head, horn and plated skin cut line by line into the block
The Rhinoceros Dürer Never Saw
In 1515 an Indian rhinoceros reached Lisbon. A letter and a rough sketch travelled north to Nuremberg, and Albrecht Dürer cut a woodcut of an animal he never laid eyes... Read more...