The Frame We Don't Sell

Every print leaves here rolled in a tube, unframed. That is deliberate, and it puts a job in your hands. This is how to do it well.

Why we don't sell frames

Three reasons, in the order they matter.

Glass does not survive the post. A framed 70 × 100 leaves the workshop perfect and arrives, often enough, with a corner of the moulding pushed in or the glazing cracked against the print — which is the worst outcome, because broken glass moving inside a sealed frame will scratch the paper. Shipping to the United States and Switzerland is free. We are not going to pay for that promise with your print.

The frame is the part that belongs to your room. Wall colour, the light it gets, what else is hanging near it, whether the room is oak or steel or plaster — none of that is visible from here. A frame chosen without seeing the wall is a guess dressed up as a service.

A drop-shipped frame is a compromise on every axis at once. Four mouldings, one glazing, no mat, no conservation mount, no choice about any of it. It is not a bad object. It is simply less good than what you can get, often for a comparable price, from someone standing in front of your print with a mat cutter.

The exception is trade, and it is at the end of this piece.

The measurement to give

Give the sheet size, not the image size. Every product page lists both, and they are not the same: the image sits inside a printed white border. A 40 × 50 print goes in a 40 × 50 frame.

The white border is not a mat. It is printed, part of the sheet, with the lower margin slightly deeper than the upper — the old framer's trick, because the eye reads a geometrically centred image as sitting low. There is no board in the package, and you do not need to buy one. This alone saves most people forty francs and a week.

One thing to know about frames: the rebate, the lip that holds the glazing and the sheet in place, overlaps the picture by roughly three to five millimetres on every side. So a 50 × 70 frame shows a little less than the full 50 × 70. With our border that eats white, not picture, and no one will ever notice. It only matters if you want the edge of the sheet itself to be visible — see float mounting below.

Route one: a ready-made frame

Almost all our sheets are standard metric formats: 30 × 30, 30 × 40, 40 × 50, 50 × 50, 50 × 70, 70 × 70, 70 × 100, and the same sizes turned landscape — 40 × 30, 50 × 40, 70 × 50, 80 × 60, 100 × 70. In Europe every one of these is stocked by furniture shops, department stores and framers. Buy off the shelf and it fits.

The one exception is 27 × 35 cm, which is the imperial 11 × 14 inch size. It exists for the small Japanese sheets: a chūban woodblock print measures about 25 × 19 cm, and on a 30 × 40 sheet it floats with five and a half centimetres of white on either side. 27 × 35 sits close around it. Ask for an 11 × 14 frame — stocked everywhere in the United States, and easy to find in Europe online.

In the United States two of our formats are standard sizes: 40 × 50 cm is 16 × 20 inches and 27 × 35 cm is 11 × 14 inches, both of which drop into any framing-aisle frame. The rest are metric with no US equivalent; buy a metric frame online, or take the sheet to a framer.

If you go this route, two small upgrades are worth the twenty minutes:

1. Throw away the grey backing card. The board that comes in a cheap frame is wood-pulp cardboard, acidic, and over years it will brown the back of the sheet in a line where it touches. A framer will cut acid-free board to size for very little, or you can buy a sheet and cut it yourself.
2. Don't trap the sheet against the glass. Attach it to the backing board with acid-free photo corners so it can move as the paper takes up and gives off humidity. Paper that is pinned flat between glass and board will eventually ripple, and ripples are permanent.

A 49-franc print in a 25-franc frame, mounted like that, is an honest object. There is nothing to apologise for.

Route two: the framer

If you take the print to a framer, you will be asked a series of questions, usually quickly and in trade language. Here is what to say, in this order, and why.

1. “It's a pigment giclée on 200 gsm matte paper. Please mount it reversibly.” Reversible is the word that matters. It tells the framer you want the sheet to be removable, undamaged, in fifty years.
2. “Acid-free photo corners, or Japanese paper hinges with wheat-starch paste.” Those are the two conservation-standard methods. Refuse dry mounting (heat-bonding the sheet to a board — irreversible), self-adhesive tape of any kind, and spray adhesive. A framer who reaches for masking tape is telling you something about the shop.
3. “Keep the glazing off the paper.” Either a cut mat, which creates the gap by its own thickness, or, if you want no mat, plastic spacers hidden in the rebate. Paper in direct contact with glass in a humid room can bond to it. That is unrecoverable.
4. “Acid-free backing board, and please seal the back.” Gummed paper tape across the join keeps out dust and insects. It costs almost nothing and it is the difference between a frame that stays clean for twenty years and one that does not.
5. The glazing. This is the real decision, and it is the next section.

Mat or no mat? Our sheets already carry a generous printed border, so a mat is optional rather than necessary. Add one if you want the print to sit deeper and read as a more formal object, or if you are matching a wall of already-matted pictures. If you do, ask for the window to overlap the printed border by a few millimetres rather than trying to align the two edges — an attempted alignment that is out by a millimetre looks like a mistake; a deliberate overlap looks like a decision.

Float mounting is the other option: the sheet is mounted on top of a backing board with its edges showing, and spacers hold the glazing off. It suits our prints well, because the border is designed as part of the sheet. Note that a float mount needs a frame larger than the sheet — a 50 × 70 print floats in a 60 × 80 or 70 × 100 frame.

Glazing: the decision that costs money

Three categories, and the trade-offs are real.

Standard picture glass. Cheapest, clear, heavy, reflective, and it does almost nothing about ultraviolet light. Perfectly adequate in a hallway or any wall that does not get daylight.

Acrylic (PMMA, sold as Plexiglas or Perspex). Roughly half the weight of glass and it does not shatter — a 70 × 100 sheet of 2 mm picture glass works out at about 3.5 kg, the same size in 2 mm acrylic at under 1.7 kg. Above 70 cm most framers will recommend it, and above a bed, a sofa or a cot it is the only responsible choice. It scratches easily and attracts dust with static, so clean it with a soft cloth and never with an ammonia cleaner. UV-filtering grades exist and cost little more.

Anti-reflective glass with a UV filter, sold under names like museum glass or art glass. It is the expensive line on the quote and it does two things: it very nearly removes the reflection, so you see the print rather than the window behind you, and it blocks most of the ultraviolet. Ask for the actual figure — UV-filtering glazing is typically sold at around 70 % or around 99 % UV block, and the number is on the spec sheet. On a 70 × 100 in a bright room it is the single upgrade that changes how the picture looks.

What we would do: standard glass on a 30 × 40 in a corridor; UV-filtering acrylic on anything 50 × 70 or larger; anti-reflective UV glass if the wall faces a window and the print is the one thing in the room you want people to look at.

Pigment inks on acid-free paper are rated for over a century indoors. That rating assumes indirect light. Direct sun will beat any glazing eventually — if the wall gets a shaft of afternoon sun across it, move the picture rather than buying your way out.

Reading the quote

Ask for it itemised. A framing quote has four lines, and once you can see them you can negotiate sensibly:

1. Moulding, priced by the running metre. A 50 × 70 frame uses 2.4 m plus waste. This is where the price range is widest, and where a plainer profile saves the most.
2. Glazing, priced by area, and the museum grades are several times the price of standard glass. Usually the largest single line on a big frame.
3. Mount and backing — board, cutting, hinging.
4. Labour and assembly.

Get two quotes for anything 50 × 70 or larger. The spread between framers on the same specification is wide, and it is not a reliable guide to quality. What is a reliable guide: whether they answer the five questions above without having to look anything up.

Before it goes in the frame

Your print arrives rolled, and it will want to stay rolled for a day or two. Unroll it face up on a clean flat surface, lay a sheet of clean paper over it, and weight the corners with books. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours is normally enough. Do not use heat, do not iron it, and do not roll it backwards to counteract the curl — that cracks the ink layer along the fold.

Handle it by the edges, or with clean cotton gloves. Fingerprints on a matte surface do not wipe off; the oil sits in the coating and shows under glass.

Where to hang it

The convention most museums use is the centre of the picture at about 145 to 150 cm from the floor — roughly eye level for a standing adult. Over furniture, go by the furniture instead: our own photographs show the sheet with its lower edge 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard, which is about as close as looks right without the picture appearing to rest on it.

Two hooks rather than one, spaced about a third of the width in from each side. A single central hook lets a large frame rotate a degree or two every time a door closes, and a frame that is one degree off is more irritating than one that is five.

Not above a radiator, not in a bathroom, not on an exterior wall that gets cold enough to condense.

For businesses, we do frame

Everything above is written for a single print going onto a wall you can see. A hotel corridor, a waiting room or an office floor is a different problem: there the frames need to match each other exactly, nobody wants to run twenty pieces through a local framer one at a time, and the specification matters more than the individual choice.

So for trade we supply framed. The frames are made and fitted alongside the print in the same eight production countries, in white, natural wood, dark wood or black, glazed and ready to hang. Every sheet size in the catalogue is available framed, from 27 × 35 up to 100 × 70, including the square formats. Because production is local to the destination, a job for a building in Zurich, London or Chicago is made near that building.

Minimum quantities, framed:

1. One motif, one size, one frame — from 5 pieces. A corridor of the same image, a repeated print across identical rooms. One specification, one approval, nothing to curate.
2. A series — from 10 pieces. Different motifs and sizes, but one frame specification across the set. This is what most buildings actually need, and it is where we also do the selection work: a set on a theme, with the accompanying text for each piece.
3. Conservation framing by a framer — from 25 pieces, or 15 for a single repeated motif. Free choice of moulding, anti-reflective UV glass, conservation mounting. This route goes through a framer rather than through production, so it earns its price only across a batch.

Unframed prints have no minimum at all; trade pricing starts at 10 sheets.

Lead times. Framed pieces are produced in three to five working days plus transit — usually inside two weeks from artwork sign-off. Conservation framing is four to six weeks, and that is normal for the work, not a delay.

Samples. A single framed piece can be supplied before you commit, at unit price. If an order of ten or more follows, we credit it.

For a quotation, write to info@museartis.com with the number of pieces, the sizes, and something about the space. More on the terms on the Trade page, and the material details on the Print + Framing Guide.