Ukiyo-e sheets printed whole from the museums' own open-access scans — Hokusai's Great Wave, Hiroshige's rain and snow, the narrow tanzaku bird panels. Every sheet is offered at 1:1, the size it left the block-cutter's hands.
Ukiyo-e sheets printed whole, from the museums' own open-access scans. Hokusai's Great Wave, Hiroshige's rain and snow, the narrow tanzaku bird panels.
Every sheet is offered at 1:1. Not most of them — all thirteen. The first size on every listing puts the picture on paper at the size it left the block-cutter's hands, somewhere between 17 and 38 centimetres. That is smaller than people expect. An ōban sheet is about 25 × 37 cm, roughly A4 turned sideways; the Great Wave is a picture you hold, not a picture you stand back from. We think the true size is worth having, so it is always the first option, and the enlargement is always the second.
Which impression, and why it matters. A woodblock print is not one object photographed several times. Every impression is a separate pull from the blocks, printed in a different year, kept in a different drawer, exposed to different light — and nearly all have faded unevenly, the reds first. So the choice of copy is a curatorial decision, and each listing names it. Our Great Wave is the Art Institute of Chicago's, not the Metropolitan's, because the Met's sheet has lost its pink dawn sky. Maples at Mama comes from Minneapolis for the same reason: that impression still carries the band of pink at the horizon. Red Fuji comes from Minneapolis too, chosen after eight impressions in four collections were measured against each other.
The narrow panels. Three of these are ōtanzaku — bird-and-flower panels about 38 × 17 cm, a format almost nobody reproduces because it fits no standard frame. At 1:1 on a 40 × 50 sheet that leaves about 11.5 cm of white on each side: the widest margins in the shop, and deliberate. A tall narrow picture floating in white is what the format was for.
Whole sheets, with one stated exception. We reproduce the printed block entire, including the paper the printer left around it. The exception is Hiroshige's Shōno: Driving Rain: the museum's sheet has cut corners and a trimmed edge, our first build reproduced them, and we withdrew it — that listing now carries the largest clean rectangle inside the picture, and says so on the page.
Each listing names the holding institution and the accession number, the sheet size the museum catalogues, and the scale we print at. Where our measurement of the block differs from the catalogued figure — usually by about one percent, the width of a hand-trimmed edge — the difference is on the page too.
If you are working out what frame an ōban, chūban or ōtanzaku needs — for one of ours or for a period sheet you already own — the measurements are in How to frame a Japanese woodblock print.
Giclée prints, twelve pigment inks on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, generous white border, ready to frame or mat. Unframed, shipped rolled in a tube.
