Paper
200 gsm archival matte, pigment inks, FSC certified. Matte rather than gloss: no glare, and it sits flat in a frame. No optical brighteners, which matters when the original is 500 years old.
A woodcut from 1515 was printed on thin, hand-made paper. A 19th-century plate came out of a book. These are works on paper, and they were never card. 200 gsm is substantial enough to handle and frame, light enough to read as a sheet rather than a board.
Sizes
Sheets run from 27 × 35 cm to 100 × 70 cm. Upright: 27 × 35, 30 × 30, 30 × 40, 40 × 50, 50 × 50, 50 × 70, 70 × 70 and 70 × 100 cm. Landscape: 40 × 30, 50 × 40, 70 × 50, 80 × 60 and 100 × 70 cm.
All but one are standard metric picture formats. The exception is 27 × 35 cm, which exists for the small Japanese sheets: a chūban woodblock print measures about 25 × 19 cm, and on a 30 × 40 sheet it floats. 27 × 35 sits close around it and matches the 11 × 14 inch frame, which is stocked in the United States and easy to find in Europe online.
Not every work appears in every size, and most appear in two: one at the size of the original, one enlarged or reduced. A format is released only when the source file carries it at 300 dpi at that print size — we do not enlarge a file to fill a size it cannot hold, and there is a ceiling on enlargement as well as a floor on resolution. Each product page lists the sizes available for that work and the scale factor for each. The reasoning is in Why This Print Is Not Bigger.
What the sizes cost
Price follows the sheet, not the motif. Every print of the same sheet size costs the same, whatever it shows and whatever it cost us to prepare.
CHF 49 — 27 × 35, 30 × 30, 30 × 40, 40 × 30
CHF 59 — 40 × 50, 50 × 40, 50 × 50
CHF 89 — 50 × 70, 70 × 50
CHF 109 — 70 × 70, 80 × 60
CHF 129 — 70 × 100, 100 × 70
Shipping is free to the United States and Switzerland, with no minimum order. Deliveries to Switzerland are charged in Swiss francs (CHF), deliveries to the United States in US dollars (USD).
Finding a frame
We do not sell frames. Framed glass arrives damaged far too often to justify shipping it across a continent, and you will choose better than we can. The full practical guide — what to say at a framer's counter, which glazing to pick, how to read a quote — is in The Frame We Don't Sell. The short version follows.
In Europe every metric format is stocked by furniture shops, department stores and framers. Buy off the shelf and it fits. For 27 × 35 cm, ask for an 11 × 14 inch frame.
In the United States the situation differs. 40 × 50 cm is 16 × 20 inches and 27 × 35 cm is 11 × 14 inches — both US standard sizes, available in any framing aisle. The other formats are metric and have no exact US equivalent. Three good options:
Order the 27 × 35 or 40 × 50 cm size and frame it off the shelf.
Buy a European-size frame online — several retailers and framers stock metric sizes.
Take the sheet to a framer and have it mounted in a slightly larger frame with a cut mat.
If you are unsure which size to order for a frame you already own, write to info@museartis.com with the frame's inside measurement and we will tell you what fits.
How to frame a Japanese woodblock print
More people search for how to frame a Japanese woodblock print than for most of the prints themselves, and the question is usually about a sheet someone already owns. It has a short answer and a longer one. The short answer is a measurement: Japanese woodblock prints do not come in standard sizes, and no off-the-shelf frame is made for them. That is not a fault in the frames. The formats were fixed by the size of a sheet of hand-made washi paper cut in halves and quarters, long before anyone standardised picture frames.
The three formats you are most likely to be holding. These are the figures the museums catalogue for the twelve sheets in our own Japanese collection:
Ōban — the standard full sheet: 33 to 37.6 cm on the long side, 22.2 to 25.4 cm on the short, across our twelve. The Great Wave is one, 37.6 cm wide and 25.4 high. Landscape sheets are called ōban yoko-e, upright ones ōban tate-e. Nearly every famous ukiyo-e print you can name is an ōban.
Chūban — half of that, about 25 × 19 cm.
Ōtanzaku — a tall narrow panel, about 38 × 17 cm, used almost exclusively for bird-and-flower subjects.
What actually fits. An ōban is roughly a 1.48 ratio; no standard frame is cut to it, so the answer is always a larger frame plus a cut mat. A 40 × 50 cm frame (16 × 20 in) takes an upright ōban with about 7 cm of mat at the sides and 6.5 at the top and bottom — generous, correct, and the size most framers will suggest without being asked. Turn it for a landscape sheet: 50 × 40 cm (20 × 16 in), 6.5 cm at the sides, 7.3 above and below. A chūban goes into 27 × 35 cm (11 × 14 in). An ōtanzaku has a ratio near 2.2 and fits nothing at all: on a 40 × 50 sheet it leaves about 11.5 cm of white on each side, which looks extreme in a shop and correct on a wall — a tall narrow picture floating in space is what the format was designed for. Our three panels are printed exactly that way.
Your sheet will not match the nominal size. Every ukiyo-e sheet was trimmed by hand, so the same format varies by a centimetre or more between impressions — more than four centimetres of spread on the long side across our own twelve. Measure your sheet before ordering a frame or a mat. Do not order from the format name.
Two things not to do to an original. Never dry-mount it — heat and adhesive are irreversible and destroy the value of the sheet. Never trim it to fit, including the blank margin: the margin often carries the publisher's and censor's seals, and a trimmed sheet is a damaged one. If the sheet has a deckle or an uneven edge you want to see, ask for float-mounting on a rag board rather than a window mat laid over the edge.
Light is the real enemy, and it takes the reds first. This is not a generality. The reason we print the Great Wave from the Art Institute of Chicago's impression rather than the Metropolitan Museum's is that the Met's sheet has lost the pink of its dawn sky to light, and Chicago's still has it. The organic colourants of nineteenth-century Japanese printing — safflower red, dayflower blue — fade faster than anything else on the sheet, and they do not come back. UV-filtering glazing, and a wall that does not face the sun. Whatever the glazing, it must not touch the paper: washi is thin and cockles against glass. A mat gives the gap; without a mat, ask for spacers.
If your sheet is a genuine period impression rather than a reproduction, this is a conversation for a framer with museum or conservation experience, not a framing counter in a shopping centre. Ours are giclée reproductions on 200 gsm fine art paper — you can frame them without any of that caution, and the sizes above still apply.
The white border
Every print carries a white margin around the image, with the lower margin slightly deeper than the upper — the convention framers have used for centuries, because the eye reads a geometrically centred image as sitting low.
This is a printed border, not a physical mat. There is no board in the package, and you do not need to buy one. The sheet is ready to frame, or to mat if you prefer. If you do add a cut mat, allow it to overlap the printed border by a few millimetres rather than trying to align the two edges exactly.
Two measurements
Every product page gives both the sheet size and the image size. They are not the same, and you should know which you are buying. The frame follows the sheet; the mat opening follows the image. Note that a frame's rebate overlaps the sheet by three to five millimetres on each side — with our border, that eats white rather than picture.
Glass and light
Pigment inks on acid-free paper are archival, but no print survives direct sunlight indefinitely. Hang away from a south-facing window, or use UV-filtering glass or acrylic. Acrylic is lighter and safer for the large formats — a 70 × 100 sheet of 2 mm picture glass works out at about 3.5 kg, the same size in acrylic at under 1.7 kg — and it is what most framers will suggest above 70 cm.
Whatever the glazing, it must not touch the paper. A mat creates that gap by its own thickness; without a mat, ask for spacers.
Measure first
The most common disappointment with prints is size. Mark the sheet dimensions on your wall with masking tape before ordering, and stand back. Ten minutes with a roll of tape prevents most returns.
Production
Printed locally in eight countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. Production takes two to four working days, then shipping. Prints ship rolled in a tube; let the sheet settle flat under a weight for a day or two before framing. If it arrives damaged, we replace it — no return shipment needed.