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), Strawberry Thief, design registered 1883
- Object
- A cut length of plain weave cotton, discharge printed at Merton Abbey, Surrey. 88.3 × 99.1 cm. The museum dates this length to about 1936; the selvedge says otherwise — see below.
- Held by
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs Henry Chisholm
- Accession
- 1937.696 (CMA object 117129)
- File
- The museum's own open-access TIFF, 13,272 × 11,848 px, 472 MB, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- [167, 147, 13229, 11799] → 13,063 × 11,653 px, the outer envelope of the cloth
- Printed at
- 50 × 50 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 37.47 cm, 0.42× — 790 dpi available
70 × 70 cm sheet: image 58.80 × 52.45 cm, 0.59× — 564 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.
Why the cut edges are in the picture
This is a piece cut off a bolt, not a finished object. Left and right are woven selvedges and run almost true — they wander by six millimetres over a metre. Top and bottom were cut with shears and have been fraying ever since: there the edge wanders by up to nineteen millimetres. We crop to the outermost thread on all four sides, which means that where the edge falls back, the museum's grey ground is printed with it. At the largest sheet that is at most about eight millimetres of grey along parts of the top edge.
One loose weft thread at the bottom, at x 3252 in the file, hangs 9.0 millimetres below everything else. It is inside the crop. Excluding it would have meant cutting a thread off the object, so it stays, the way the broken corners stay on the Atkins cyanotypes and the album paper stays in the corners of Talbot's Wrack.
What the selvedge says
Along the right-hand selvedge the firm printed its own mark into the cloth. The shears took the beginning of it, so what survives reads «…MPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W». The full form is not a guess: the companion length in this catalogue, Kennet, carries the same legend intact on its left selvedge — «REGᵩ MORRIS & COMPANY 449 OXFORD STREET LONDON W».
Morris & Co. sold from 449 Oxford Street from 1882, when the street was renumbered, and moved to 17 George Street, Hanover Square, in 1917. The mark therefore belongs to the years 1882–1917. Cleveland dates this length to about 1936. Either the cloth was printed before the move, or it was run from selvedge blocks that were already out of date. We are not in a position to settle that, so we print the museum's date and this reading side by side and leave the question standing.
What we measured
The studio ground is neutral and light — the mean of the four corners falls between 170 and 174 on a 0–255 scale. A pixel counts as cloth when any channel differs from 172 by more than 28, and an edge is set where the first run of eight consecutive cloth pixels begins. Sixteen hundred columns and fourteen hundred rows were sampled and read as a distribution, not as an average, because on a frayed edge an average describes nothing.
The anchor is the width: 99.1 cm across 13,063 pixels is 131.83 pixels per centimetre, or 335 dpi at true size. The height gives 131.98 — 0.12 % away. Two anchors that agree that closely are the sign that the crop is right. A tighter, mean-edge crop would have given a ratio nine times further from the catalogue.
Why there is no 1:1 sheet
Not because of the file. It carries 13,063 pixels across the cloth, enough for 110 cm of image at our 300 dpi floor — more than the cloth itself. It is the paper: at true size the picture alone would be 99.1 cm wide and the sheet would have to be about 118 cm. The largest square sheet we print is 70 cm. So both sheets are reductions, and the factor is printed on the size you choose rather than hidden.
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 of its own. Cleveland publishes its photograph under CC0 and permits commercial use. Nothing on this print uses «Morris & Co.» as a mark of origin: the firm is named as the historical maker, and the selvedge legend is part of the object photographed.
A note on colour
The cloth reads as indigo, but it does not carry a colour tag in this shop. Measured by the house method — a 240-pixel rendition of the crop, saturation floor 0.06 — the blue band holds 0.428 of the coloured area against a threshold of 0.60. Cream, olive and rose take the rest. Raising the floor to 0.15 lifts blue only to 0.499. The eye is not wrong; the pixels simply do not clear the bar, and we do not bend the bar.
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, 5.83 above, 6.71 below.
- 70 × 70 cm sheet
- A 70 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 28 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 8.16 above, 9.39 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 × 36.87 cm for the small sheet, 58.20 × 51.85 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