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 14.30 cm each side, 12.34 cm top and bottom — the photograph is small and the sheet gives it room, which is how these studies were mounted in the first place.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 13.60 cm each side, 9.69 cm top and bottom.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 20.80 × 14.72 cm for the small sheet, 42.20 × 30.03 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879), Sky Study, Paris, 1856–57
- Object
- Albumen print from a wet collodion negative, 15.3 × 21.4 cm
- Held by
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Inventory
- 1988.191
- File
- The museum’s open-access master, 5976 × 4278 px
- Crop
- None by us. The museum’s file is the print itself; we print it whole.
The photograph Marville made
An afternoon in 1856 or 1857, above the Paris rooftops. The dome of the Panthéon sits low at the horizon and everything above it is cloud. Marville is remembered for the other work — the streets of the old city, photographed for the municipality just before Haussmann pulled them down — but this comes from before that commission, when photographing a sky was still held to be impossible.
The difficulty was chemical. A wet collodion plate is far more sensitive to blue than to anything else, so an exposure long enough to hold a landscape burned the sky to blank white. Photographers of the 1850s printed their skies in from a second negative, or did without. Marville’s answer here was simpler and stranger: give up the landscape. The rooftops are there only as a dark hem at the bottom, underexposed and half lost, so that the plate can spend its whole range on the cloud.
What we checked in the file
The museum catalogues the picture at 15.3 × 21.4 cm and the file measures 5976 × 4278 px — ratios of 1.3987 and 1.3969, which is 0.13 % apart. For a photograph that is as close as measurement gets, and it needs no explanation and no correction. The catalogued width is the anchor, as everywhere in this catalogue: 21.4 cm over 5976 px is 709 dpi.
Colour, measured from the file at 400 × 286 px: mean RGB 141 / 125 / 108. Red exceeds blue by 33 points and every single pixel reads as warm. That is the albumen paper itself, toned, running from cream through ochre to a brown-black. We do not correct it towards neutral and we do not raise the contrast. A print that has warmed over 170 years has not been damaged; it has aged.
Why the large sheet stops at twice the size
At 709 dpi the file could be printed 50.6 cm wide and still hold exactly 300 dpi — 2.37× the original. We stop at 42.80 cm, which is exactly 2× and leaves 355 dpi in hand. Two reasons. The house rule asks for resolution with reserve rather than at the limit, and a factor you can state in one word is more honest than one that reads like a rounding.
The small sheet prints the photograph at 21.40 cm wide: original size, 1:1, with 709 dpi available. Held at arm’s length it is the object Marville handled.
One thing to expect at 2×: the grain of the albumen and the texture of the paper become visible, and so do the small losses in the rooftops. That is the photograph. We have not smoothed any of it away.
What we are allowed to sell
Marville died in 1879, so the photograph has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1950, and in the United States as a work published long before 1930.
At the reproduction level, the Cleveland Museum of Art publishes both the object and its photograph under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 and serves the full-resolution file openly, asserting no additional rights. Checked 10 September 2026.
Printed by Gelato on 200 gsm fine art giclée paper with pigment inks. A reproduction, not an original photograph, and not sold as one.