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.
The sheet you have
- Work
- William Morris (British, 1834–1896), Kennet, design registered 18 October 1883
- Object
- A cut length of plain weave printed cotton, Merton Abbey, Surrey. 90.2 × 97.8 cm. The museum dates this length to about 1920; the selvedge says otherwise — see below.
- Held by
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs Henry Chisholm
- Accession
- 1937.698 (CMA object 117131)
- File
- The museum's own open-access TIFF, 12,971 × 11,936 px, 465 MB, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- [92, 0, 12864, 11894] → 12,773 × 11,895 px, the outer envelope of the cloth
- Printed at
- 50 × 50 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 39.11 cm, 0.43× — 772 dpi available
70 × 70 cm sheet: image 58.80 × 54.76 cm, 0.60× — 552 dpi available
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. Nothing enlarged in software. - 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.
A river, and eight others
Between 1883 and 1885 Morris designed nine printed cottons and named each after a tributary of the Thames: Evenlode, Windrush, Kennet and Wey in 1883, then Loddon, Wandle and Cray, then Lea and Medway. He knew that river system from the journeys between his London house and Kelmscott Manor, and the names mark the years in which his patterns stopped being flat repeats and started to move like water. This one has two layers: a slow diagonal of stems and open flower heads, and underneath it a much finer mesh of leaf and blossom that fills every gap. One is read from across the room, the other at arm's length.
Which measurement we trust
The museum gives 90.2 × 97.8 cm. Laid over the file, those two figures disagree with each other by 0.9 %: the width anchor comes to 130.60 pixels per centimetre, the height anchor to 131.74. Our own rule says that a gap above 0.5 % means an anchor is wrong.
Here it means something else, and the cloth says which. The 97.8 cm is the loom width, selvedge to selvedge — set by the loom and constant down the whole piece. The 90.2 cm is the length of a hand-cut, fraying edge and depends on where a tape is laid. So the width is the anchor, and measured against it this piece stands 91.1 cm tall. Nothing has been stretched or corrected to make the numbers agree.
Why the cut edges are in the picture
Left and right are woven selvedges and run nearly true. Top and bottom were cut with shears and have frayed since. We crop to the outermost thread on all four sides, so where the edge falls back the museum's grey ground prints with it.
The museum framed this shot very tightly at the top, so we checked whether the cloth had been cut off by the photograph rather than by the shears: of 3,243 columns sampled across the full width, exactly one begins at the very first row of the file and 67 within five rows of it, all of them in a single 30-pixel-wide bump between x 7,460 and x 7,490. Everywhere else there is grey ground above the cloth. Nothing of the object is missing.
What the selvedge says
Along the left-hand selvedge the firm printed its mark into the cloth, and here it survives whole: «REGᵩ MORRIS & COMPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W». Morris & Co. sold from 449 Oxford Street from 1882 and moved to 17 George Street, Hanover Square, in 1917, so the mark belongs to 1882–1917. Cleveland dates this length to about 1920. Either it was printed before the move, or it was run from selvedge blocks that were already out of date. We print the museum's date and this reading side by side and leave the question standing.
This is also the key that reads the companion length in this catalogue: on Strawberry Thief the same legend survives only as «…MPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W», cut short by the shears.
Why there is no 1:1 sheet
Not because of the file — it carries 12,773 pixels across the cloth, more than enough to print it at true size. It is the paper: at true size the picture alone would be 97.8 cm wide and the sheet would have to be about 117 cm. The largest square sheet we print is 70 cm. Both sheets are therefore reductions, and the factor is printed on the size you choose.
What we are allowed to sell
Morris died on 3 October 1896. The design has been out of copyright in Switzerland, the EU and the UK since 1 January 1967, and it was registered and published in 1883, long before the 1930 line that governs the United States. The length photographed here is a later impression from the firm's own blocks and carries no new authorship. Cleveland publishes its photograph under CC0 and permits commercial use. Nothing on this print uses «Morris & Co.» as a mark of origin.
A note on colour
Measured by the house method — a 240-pixel rendition of the crop, saturation floor 0.06 — the warm band leads with 0.438 of the coloured area and blue follows at 0.410, against a threshold of 0.60 for a colour tag. The cloth reads as indigo from a distance, but the cream and ochre of the pattern cover more of it than the ground does once saturation is counted. So it carries no colour tag, and we say why rather than tagging it anyway.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 50 cm sheet
- A 50 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 20 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 5.06 above, 5.83 below.
- 70 × 70 cm sheet
- A 70 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 28 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 7.09 above, 8.15 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 38.51 cm for the small sheet, 58.20 × 54.16 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
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