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 4.00 cm each side, 3.13 cm above and below.
- 100 × 75 cm sheet
- A 100 × 75 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 30 in. Margins 10.00 cm each side, 5.37 cm above and 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 × 33.14 cm for the small sheet, 79.40 × 63.66 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944), Vinter ved Nordstrand / Winter at Nordstrand, 1900–01
- Object
- Oil on unprimed cardboard, 64.5 × 80 cm
- Held by
- Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
- Inventory
- DEP717
- File
- The museum's own IIIF service, 11,503 × 9,240 px — 106 megapixels, 68.5 MB as delivered
- Crop
- None by us. The museum's file is already cropped to the painted surface; we print it whole.
The picture Munch made
Two pine trunks stand hard against the frozen shore at Nordstrand, on the eastern side of the fjord below Kristiania, where Munch spent the winters of 1900 and 1901. Behind them the picture is built almost entirely out of horizontals: the dark band of open water, the white shelf of snow along the shore, the grey of the far bank. The trunks are the only strong verticals, and they cut the long bands into segments the way a window frame cuts a view.
Where the brown comes through
The support is unprimed cardboard, not canvas, and Munch left it bare in places. Look into the snow in the lower half and into the sky above the far bank: the brown of the board itself is doing the work, with paint laid only thinly over it or not at all. That is why the winter light in this picture reads warm rather than blue, and it is the one thing a reproduction has to get right. We do not correct the museum's colour, so the board stays brown.
The file, and what "cropped" means
SMK names its file with the word cropped. We checked what had been cropped away. A thirty-pixel band along each of the four edges, sampled at native resolution, gives mean RGB 65/53/48 at the top, 106/94/93 at the bottom, 91/79/76 at the left and 111/99/98 at the right, each with a tonal range running from near black to near white. A cardboard edge, a mount or a photographic ground would show as a uniform light or dark strip. There is none on any side. The file is the painted surface, edge to edge, and nothing has been cut away by us.
Why the large sheet is 1:1, and why its height is 0.37 % short
The museum catalogues the picture at 64.5 × 80 cm. The file measures 11,503 × 9,240 px, a ratio of 1.2449 against 1.2403 for the catalogued dimensions — 0.37 % apart. Read as anchors, that is 143.79 px/cm across the width and 143.26 px/cm down the height.
We take the catalogued width as the anchor, as everywhere in this catalogue. The 100 × 75 cm sheet therefore prints the picture 80.00 cm wide: original size, 1:1, at 365 dpi. Its printed height comes out 64.26 cm against the catalogued 64.5 — the same 0.37 %. Unprimed cardboard cut by hand does not have perfectly straight edges, and a photograph of it will not match a tape measure to the last millimetre. We could close the gap by stretching the file 0.37 % in one direction. We do not, because that would make the picture wrong in order to make a number right.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.53× original, 696 dpi available.
What we are allowed to sell
Munch died on 23 January 1944, so the painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1 January 2015. For the United States we follow the practice of the Art Institute of Chicago, which publishes Munch works up to 1901 as public domain; this picture is of 1900–01.
At the reproduction level, SMK publishes both the object and its photograph under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 and serves the full-resolution file openly, with no cap. The museum asserts no separate right in the photograph. The inventory prefix DEP suggests the picture is a deposit rather than an owned work — that is our reading of the prefix, not a statement by the museum; the rights statement we rely on is SMK's own.
A note on colour, and one on choosing
Measured from the museum file: mean RGB 83 / 86 / 92, with blue nine points above red, and 38.8 % of all pixels reading as unambiguously blue. Blue-dominant, but not saturated — the snow, the far bank and the bare board pull the average towards grey-brown. On a wall this reads as a cool, quiet picture with a warm undertow, not as a blue one.
Between the two sizes: the small sheet is a picture on a wall. The large one is the painting, at the size Munch painted it. If you have the wall, take the large one — 365 dpi at 1:1 is well above what the eye resolves at viewing distance, and the horizontal bands only work at full length.