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
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 8.26 above, 9.49 below.
- 100 × 70 cm sheet
- A 100 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 28 in. Margins 8.00 cm each side, 11.13 above, 12.79 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 58.20 × 31.65 cm for the small sheet, 83.40 × 45.48 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883), View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, 1867
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 108 × 196 cm — unfinished, never framed
- Held by
- Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo, The Fine Art Collections. Gift from Nasjonalgalleriets Venner, 1923
- Inventory
- NG.M.01293
- File
- The museum's own IIIF service, 140,667 × 77,819 px — 10.9 gigapixels. Photograph: Nasjonalmuseet / Børre Høstland
- Crop
- The dark studio ground removed at the outermost edge of the canvas. Nothing of the object is cut.
- Printed at
- 70 × 50 cm sheet: image 58.80 × 32.25 cm, 0.30× — 6062 dpi available
100 × 70 cm sheet: image 84.00 × 46.08 cm, 0.43× — 4243 dpi available
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. - Made in
- The certified house nearest your address, to one specification: 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, same colour profile, same border geometry.
The picture Manet left
Paris from the hill at the Trocadéro, in the summer of the greatest World's Fair yet held. The exposition halls run along the horizon; a gasworks chimney and the light of the Pont de l'Alma stand up out of them; over the right-hand corner Nadar's balloon Le Géant hangs on its rope. In front of all that, on a green slope, a scattering of people who are not looking at the fair and not looking at each other: a horseman, women in crinolines, a gardener with a hose, two boys, a dog, soldiers, a woman with a parasol.
Manet had been kept out of the exposition's official art section, so he built his own pavilion by the Pont de l'Alma and painted the fair from the slope above it. Then he stopped. In June 1867 the news reached Paris that the French-backed Emperor Maximilian had been shot in Mexico, and Manet turned to that subject instead. This canvas stayed a sketch, was sold cheaply at the auction after his death because it was unfinished, passed through the great Manet collector Auguste Pellerin, came back onto the Paris market during the First World War, and was bought by a Norwegian shipowner. The Friends of the National Gallery gave it to Oslo in 1923.
The gardener
One figure repays looking at more than the others, and it is the one we chose for the detail image: the man at the lower left watering the flowerbed, the jet of water laid in with a handful of white and blue strokes across the dark green. He is the only person in the picture who is working. He is also one of the very few whose face Manet actually built up — bearded, under a straw hat, looking down at his own hands — where most of the crowd is two or three strokes and no features at all.
He has been read as Manet himself, hidden in his own picture: the painter shut out of the official exhibition, standing at the front edge of the fair with his back to it, doing his own work. The canvas settles nothing. There is no inscription, no study, no letter that says so, and an unfinished head is exactly the kind of evidence that can be made to mean anything. We pass the reading on because it is worth having in front of you when you look at the print, and we mark it as a reading rather than a finding.
Why the edges look like that
Because it was never framed. The museum photographed the bare canvas against a dark ground, so the tacking edges, the fold over the stretcher, the charcoal underdrawing and the ragged line where the paint simply stops are all in the file — and all of them are in your print. The thin warm band around the picture is not a border we designed. It is the canvas Manet stretched and never covered.
We cut away the dark studio ground and nothing else. The canvas edge was measured natively at seven positions along the top and bottom and five along each side: it lies between 462 and 729 pixels in from the top of the file, 389 and 753 from the bottom, 0 and 754 from the left, 349 and 792 from the right. Our crop takes the outermost of those on each side, so no canvas is lost anywhere; the price is that where the edge runs further in, a sliver of dark ground stays in the corner — at most one centimetre on the original, three millimetres on the large print. That is the same decision we made at Talbot's Wrack and Mondrian's lozenge: when the object does not fill a rectangle, the ground stays and gets named.
We did not crop to the edge of the paint. On an unfinished canvas that boundary is soft and one to two centimetres wide, and cutting there would mean drawing a line the painter never drew.
Ten point nine gigapixels
Oslo photographed this canvas at 140,667 × 77,819 pixels. That is eight times the largest file we had until today and, at our 300 dpi floor, enough for a print almost twelve metres wide. Every other sheet in this shop is a negotiation between the picture and the paper; this one is not. The size is decided by the wall and by nothing else, and on the large sheet there are more than 4,200 dots per inch available where we use three hundred. The brush hairs are in the file.
Why the margins are deeper above and below
The picture is nearly twice as wide as it is tall — 1.82 against sheets of 1.40 and 1.43 — so on both sizes the width binds at our standard 84 % of the sheet and the paper left over collects above and below. That is the right way round for a panorama, which wants air over the horizon rather than at the ends. Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Manet died on 30 April 1883, so the seventy-year term ran out on 1 January 1954 in Switzerland, the EU and the UK, and the painting is long out of copyright in the United States as well. The museum states plainly: free use, no known copyright restrictions.
The photograph. This is the first source in our catalogue that licenses its photograph rather than waiving it: the Nasjonalmuseet publishes the file under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), photograph by Børre Høstland. CC BY allows commercial use and asks for credit. Our own position does not depend on that licence — the original is flat and was photographed square on, so no photographer's right arises in any market we ship to — but where a museum asks to be credited we credit it, obliged or not. Hence the photographer's name on the product page and here.
What we do not claim. This is a giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured by our own method, 72 % of the sheet carries colour and half of that is green. That is below our threshold, so the sheet carries no colour tag — correctly: more than a quarter of the picture is sky too grey to count as a colour at all. It reads as weather, and we would rather not send someone looking for a green wall to a grey painting.
One more thing this record should say. Most sheets in this shop were chosen from measured demand. This one was not: it was asked for by name, by someone who has published on the painting. The catalogue has one other entry of that kind, Rembrandt's Three Trees, and both carry a field that says so.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com