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
- Johann Heinrich Lips (Swiss, 1758–1817), Odysseus, at the Doors of Hades, Meets the Shades of Tiresias and Anticlea, 1785
- Object
- Pen and brown ink and black ink wash, with brown ink wash, on blued-white laid paper; 45.4 × 67 cm
- Held by
- The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Day Blake Endowment Fund
- Accession
- 2023.3178 (AIC object 270366)
- File
- AIC IIIF, 10700 × 7630 px (native 10752 × 7667)
- Crop
- [344, 384, 9988 × 6864] px
- Printed at
- 376 dpi at 100 × 70 cm · 431 dpi at 70 × 50 cm
Which impression, and why this one
This is a drawing, not a print, so there is no question of which impression: there is one sheet and Chicago has it. Lips was a Zurich engraver who spent the 1780s in Rome and Weimar — Goethe brought him back as drawing master at the Weimar art school — and this large ink wash comes from that Roman decade, when he was working in the neoclassical manner on Homeric subjects at a scale meant to be looked at from across a room.
The Art Institute acquired it in 2023, which is why it is a recent addition to our own list: the file did not exist publicly before that.
What we measured
Lips drew a ruled border around the composition. We located it by taking the darkest row and column near each edge — x 384 to 10292, y 424 to 7208, giving 9908 × 6784 px, a ratio of 1.4605 against the catalogued 67 / 45.4 = 1.4758. That is a 1.0 % difference, which sits in where on the deckle the museum put its ruler.
We then crop 40 px wider on every side than the ruled border, so that the rules keep a thin strip of paper around them and do not sit hard against the white margin. The anchor for all physical sizes is 9908 px = 67 cm, i.e. 147.9 px/cm.
A note for our own future source checks, kept here because it cost us time: the Art Institute's search field thumbnail.width/height is not always the size the IIIF service will actually deliver. Object 110760 reports 15038 × 5565 in search and caps at 3000 × 1133 in info.json. Always read info.json before planning a format.
What we are allowed to sell
The original. Lips died in 1817 and the drawing was made in 1785. Public domain in every market we serve.
The digitisation. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes images of public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0); its API reports is_public_domain: true for this object. A caption naming artist, title, date and museum is requested rather than required — this record carries it. The file came from the museum's own IIIF endpoint, not from an aggregator.
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 1 September 2026.
Framing this sheet
- 100 × 70 cm
- Drawing 67.54 × 46.41 cm at original size, 1:1. Margins 16.23 cm sides / 10.97 cm top / 12.62 cm bottom
- 70 × 50 cm
- Drawing 58.80 × 40.11 cm, 0.87×. Margins 5.60 cm sides / 4.46 cm top / 5.13 cm bottom
- Orientation
- Both sheets are landscape
- Frame
- A standard 100 × 70 cm or 70 × 50 cm frame takes the sheet as printed, no trimming. Nearest imperial sizes: 40 × 28 in and 28 × 20 in
- Passepartout
- The 100 × 70 sheet carries a very wide printed margin already — 16 cm at the sides — and needs no mount at all. On the 70 × 50, a mount works if you go one frame size up
- Glazing
- At 100 × 70 cm use acrylic rather than glass: lighter, and safer on a sheet this size. Brown ink is fugitive, so UV filtering is not optional here
Measure your frame before you order. Frame sizes vary between makers, and some large 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