The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 5.20 cm each side, 3.20 cm above and below.
- 50 × 70 cm sheet
- A 50 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 20 × 28 in. Margins 6.75 cm each side, 8.13 cm above and below.
- If you mat it
- Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 29.00 × 43.00 cm for the small sheet, 35.90 × 53.15 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Jan Davidsz. de Heem (Dutch, 1606–1684), Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1650–83
- Object
- Oil on copper, 54.5 × 36.5 cm
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)
- Inventory
- SK-C-214
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 5356 × 7887 px as delivered
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four edges of the file; nothing was cut and nothing added.
A bouquet that never stood in a room
Tulips, a poppy, roses, carnations, a snake's head fritillary, morning glories, honeysuckle, an ear of wheat, a pea pod. They do not flower in the same month, and no seventeenth-century vase ever held them together. De Heem worked from studies, assembling a bouquet that exists only as a painting — which is the point: the picture is about looking closely at each flower, not about a moment in a room.
Then the small life. A red admiral at the top left, a garden snail crossing the stone ledge at the bottom right, caterpillars, ants, beetles, a spider. In a Dutch flower piece these are the clock: the same picture that shows the flowers at their fullest also shows what is already eating them.
The support is copper, not canvas — a smooth plate that takes fine brushwork the way enamel does. It is the reason the highlights on the glass and the water hold up at any viewing distance, and the reason the paint surface shows no weave.
The signature that is not the painter's
The picture carries the name of Rachel Ruysch, added by a later hand at a time when her flower pieces fetched more than de Heem's. The Rijksmuseum records the signature as false and gives the painting to Jan Davidsz. de Heem. It prints with the picture. A wrong signature is part of an object's history, not a blemish to be removed — the same reason we keep foxing, worn lines and broken corners everywhere else in this catalogue.
What we measured
The file shows the copper plate alone: ten bands along each of the four edges give painted values throughout, with no light photographic ground anywhere. So there is no crop — the whole file prints.
Its ratio is 1.4726 against 1.4932 for the catalogued 54.5 × 36.5 cm, 1.4 % apart. The anchor is therefore the WIDTH, which is the dimension the photograph certainly shows in full: 36.5 cm over 5356 pixels is 146.74 px/cm, or 373 dpi at original size. Across the height that gives a printed 53.75 cm against the catalogued 54.5. The likeliest explanation is that the rebate of the frame covers a few millimetres at top and bottom — that is an inference, not a measurement, and we print what the file shows rather than stretching it to the catalogue.
Why the larger sheet is the original size
At 300 dpi the file carries 67.5 cm of picture height, so 1:1 sits comfortably inside what the resolution allows: on the 50 × 70 cm sheet the painting is printed at its own size, 36.50 × 53.75 cm, at 373 dpi. The 40 × 50 cm sheet is the reduced one, 0.81×, at 460 dpi. We did not go above original size — a painting enlarged past its own dimensions stops being a reproduction and becomes a poster.
What we are allowed to sell
De Heem died in 1684. The painting is in the public domain everywhere we ship. The Rijksmuseum publishes the object as public domain, serves the full-resolution file openly and asserts no separate right in its photograph.
A note on colour
The dark ground, the varnish and whatever three and a half centuries have done to both are the colours the museum's file carries, and we keep them: no correction, no cleaning, no brightening. What de Heem painted and what the panel has become both stay in the print.