This is the record for the sheet you bought: which original it comes from, how it was digitised, what we did to the file, and what we are allowed to sell. Nothing here is marketing. It is the paperwork.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), The Rhinoceros, 1515
- Object
- Woodcut with letterpress, German text edition; image 23.8 × 30.1 cm
- Held by
- The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
- Accession
- 1993.9
- File
- Cleveland Open Access TIFF, 5000 × 3963 px, 59.5 MB
- Crop
- [63, 124, 4940, 3963] → 4877 × 3839 px, ratio 1.2704
- Printed at
- 412 dpi at 40 × 30 cm · 300 dpi at 50 × 40 cm
Which impression, and why this one
Dürer never saw a rhinoceros. He worked from a written description and a sketch of the animal that reached Lisbon in 1515, and the woodcut he cut from them stayed the European picture of the species for the next two hundred years — armour plates, a second horn on the shoulder, and all.
The block was printed over and over, through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the later impressions are tired: the fine hatching in the hide fills in and the line breaks up. The Cleveland impression is an early one with the German letterpress text still set above the image, and that text is part of what we print. We crop from the top of the letterpress to the bottom frame line of the woodcut and trim the paper margin away, because the border on your sheet is ours, not the sixteenth century's.
Four other institutional files were measured and rejected: the Art Institute of Chicago (2778 × 2250, and a trimmed sheet without the letterpress), the National Gallery of Art (4000 × 2998), the Metropolitan Museum (3811 × 3049), and the Library of Congress — larger, but a later Dutch-text impression.
What we measured
Our crop measures 1.2704 wide to tall. The museum catalogues the block at 30.1 × 23.8 cm, which is 1.2647 — a 0.45 % difference, well inside how precisely a hand-printed sheet can be measured at all. That agreement is the check that we cropped the work and not an arbitrary rectangle.
4877 px is the most any institution publishes of this sheet. At 300 dpi that carries a printed image 41.29 cm wide, and the 50 × 40 cm sheet is built to exactly that limit. There is no larger honest size, so we do not offer one.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Dürer died in 1528 and the sheet was published in 1515. Public domain in every market we serve.
The digitisation. The Cleveland Museum of Art releases it under Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0). Commercial use permitted, attribution not required — we give it anyway.
Our file. The crop, the tonal work and the border are ours. We sell you a print of it; we do not sell you the rights to it.
Rights checked 30 August 2026.
Framing this sheet
- 40 × 30 cm
- Image 30.10 × 23.69 cm at original size, 1:1. Margins 4.95 cm sides / 2.94 cm top / 3.37 cm bottom
- 50 × 40 cm
- Image 41.29 × 32.50 cm, 1.37×. Margins 4.36 cm sides / 3.49 cm top / 4.01 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Both sheets are landscape
- Frame
- A standard 40 × 30 cm or 50 × 40 cm frame takes the sheet as printed, no trimming. Nearest imperial sizes: 16 × 12 in and 20 × 16 in
- Passepartout
- Optional. The printed border already gives the sheet air. If you want a mount as well, go one frame size up rather than cutting into the border
- Glazing
- A line woodcut lives on contrast — anti-reflective glass keeps the hatching legible under room light
Measure your frame before you order. Frame sizes vary between makers, and some frames have a rebate that swallows several millimetres on each side. We give the exact printed dimensions above so you can check; we cannot take responsibility for a frame that turns out not to fit.
All sheet records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions about this sheet: info@museartis.com