What these prints are made of.
We tell you which collection every image came from, down to the accession number. The same ought to be true of the object that arrives in the tube.
The paper
200 gsm fine art paper, FSC certified, acid-free, 0.26 mm thick, with a smooth matte surface and no optical brighteners. Matte rather than gloss: no glare behind glass, and an aged sheet reads as aged rather than dirty. Substantial enough to handle and frame, light enough to read as a sheet rather than a board — which is right, because these are works on paper and they were never card.
It is an enhanced matte fine art stock, not a cotton rag. We say so plainly rather than letting the word giclée do work it should not do. It is archival, it is FSC certified, and it holds the tonal range of an engraving better than any poster paper. It is not the hand-made sheet the original was printed on. Nothing is.
The printing
Giclée: twelve pigment inks rather than the four of an offset poster, at 1200 dpi, one sheet at a time. Twelve inks instead of four is the whole point — the extra greys and blacks are where a 500-year-old woodcut lives, and they are the difference between cross-hatching that stays as lines and cross-hatching that closes into a grey. Pigment inks on acid-free paper are rated for over a hundred years indoors without significant fading.
Every file is prepared at 300 dpi at the final print size — measured on the file we actually print from, not taken from a catalogue record. Nothing here is enlarged in software to reach a format. Where the source runs out, the size stops, and the arithmetic behind that is set out in Why This Print Is Not Bigger.
Every sheet is printed unframed, with a generous white border and the lower margin slightly deeper than the upper, the way a collection presents a work on paper. The work is never cropped to fill a format.
Where it is printed
We work with a network of certified fine art production houses in Europe, North America and Australia — eight countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Your order is made in the house nearest to the address it is going to. That is why a print reaches you in days rather than weeks, why shipping is free worldwide with no minimum, and why most orders never cross a border and so attract no duty or import VAT.
Every house works to one specification: the same paper, the same ink set, the same colour profile, the same border geometry. A 50 × 70 sheet made in Chicago and the same sheet made in Rotterdam are the same object.
Nothing is printed before you order it
There is no warehouse and no stock. A sheet exists because someone asked for it. That is also why the catalogue can stay small and specific rather than being chosen for what will move a pallet: a work is here because it passed the five criteria, not because we already own a thousand copies of it.
Prints ship rolled in a sturdy tube, interleaved with tissue. Packaging is unbranded white and recycled kraft paper, with no invoice inside and no third-party logos. The tube is recyclable.
What we do not claim
These are reproductions, made openly and made well. What we can put in writing is the file, the size and the process: the collection and accession number of the sheet we printed, the image and sheet dimensions in centimetres and inches, the scale factor against the original, and the resolution at that size. All four are on the product page, and all four can be checked — the institutions publish their digitisations openly, so you can call up the same file we worked from.
If something arrives damaged, send a photo to info@museartis.com within 30 days and we replace it, with no return shipment needed.