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
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 6.65 cm each side, 6.59 cm top, 7.58 cm bottom.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 6.56 cm each side, 4.63 cm top, 5.33 cm bottom.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 36.10 × 25.23 cm for the small sheet, 56.29 × 39.44 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), Tama River in Musashi Province (Bushū Tamagawa), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), 1831
- Object
- Colour woodblock print, ōban, horizontal, 25.7 × 36.7 cm. Published by Nishimuraya Yohachi
- Held by
- Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, bequest of Dr. Carl Mettler, Basel 1942
- Inventory
- 1942.668
- File
- The museum’s own original file, taken directly from the institution
- Crop
- At the outermost edge of the sheet. Nothing of the paper is cut.
Why this impression
The same view survives in many impressions, and we looked at the obvious ones first. The Metropolitan Museum’s copy is served at 3843 pixels across, which would print at 258 dpi at original size; the Art Institute of Chicago’s at 3000. Neither reaches our 300 dpi floor at 1:1.
The Basel sheet does, with room to spare, and it is the better impression besides. It is one of the rare pulls printed with blue rather than black outlines, which gives the whole sheet a light, flickering air — the point Judith Rauser makes about it in the round-table on Japanese art on paper in Swiss public collections (in: Bettina Gockel and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., Japan Inside/Out, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net 2026, pp. 149–164, doi:10.11588/arthistoricum.1639.c26349).
The sheet came to Basel in 1942 with the bequest of the Basel chemist and collector Carl Mettler, whose 323 woodblock prints form the core of the Kupferstichkabinett’s Japanese holdings. The Basel holdings were studied and catalogued for the exhibition Made in Japan at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2024.
What we measured
The museum’s file is 6866 × 4855 px. The sheet itself occupies 6731 × 4738 px of it (rows 58 to 4796, columns 62 to 6793), a ratio of 1.4206 against 1.4280 for the catalogued 36.7 × 25.7 cm — 0.5 % apart.
We take the catalogued width as the anchor, as everywhere in this catalogue: 36.7 cm over 6731 px is 183.4 px/cm, or 466 dpi at original size. The printed height comes out at 25.8 cm against the catalogued 25.7. We do not stretch the file to close a millimetre.
Why these two sizes
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the view at its original size, 1:1, 36.70 × 25.83 cm, at 466 dpi. The 70 × 50 cm sheet enlarges it to 1.55×, 56.89 × 40.04 cm — and that is the ceiling: 6731 px at 300 dpi are 56.99 cm. A round 1.6× would have dropped to 290 dpi, so the sheet stops at 1.55× and the margins take the rest. Both sheets place the picture at the optical centre, the foot margin a little deeper than the head.
Colour, measured from the file at 400 × 300 px: mean RGB 145 / 151 / 140; a third of the pixels read as blue, more than half as the warm tone of the paper.
What we are allowed to sell
Hokusai died in 1849, and the print has been in the public domain everywhere we sell for well over a century.
At the reproduction level, the Kunstmuseum Basel marks the image «Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel» and allows it to be shared, used for any purpose including commercial use, and adapted, without asking. It asks that the public-domain notice be kept, which we do here: Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel. Checked 19 September 2026.
Printed by Gelato on 200 gsm fine art giclée paper with pigment inks. A reproduction, not an original woodblock print, and not sold as one.