Poster or Giclée?

Why this print costs more than a poster of the same painting.

A fair question, and worth answering plainly.

Museums sell the same images twice. The Rijksmuseum will sell you a 50 × 70 poster of Vermeer's Milkmaid for under ten euros. The same museum sells a giclée of a work from the same collection for around sixty. Same archive, same file, six times the price.

The difference is not the picture. It is the process.

Poster

Four-colour offset or standard digital printing. Coated stock, usually 150–200 gsm, often with optical brighteners. Printed in runs of thousands. Colours are approximate; fine detail closes up. Made to be affordable, and it is.

Giclée

Twelve pigment inks instead of four. 1200 dpi. Archival matte paper without optical brighteners, so an aged sheet reads as aged rather than dirty. Printed one at a time. Tonal range is continuous; cross-hatching stays as lines.

What we add on top

Every sheet is printed with a generous white border, the way a collection presents a work on paper — the sheet is part of the object, not something to trim away. The work is never cropped to fill a format. And on every product page you will find the collection, the inventory number and the licence the file came from.

If you want a Milkmaid for the kitchen wall, buy the poster. It is a good poster. If you want a sheet you could frame and keep, this is what that costs.