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
- 30 × 40 cm sheet
- A 30 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Margins 5.30 cm each side, 6.23 above, 7.17 below.
- 40 × 50 cm sheet
- A 40 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 16 × 20 in. Margins 4.69 cm each side, 3.72 above, 4.28 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Anna Atkins (1799–1871) and Anne Dixon (1799–1864), Osmunda regalis, British, from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853
- Object
- Cyanotype — a photogram, made by laying the plant on paper coated with iron salts and exposing it to sunlight. No camera, no negative, no drawn line. Catalogued image 25.4 × 19.4 cm
- Inscribed
- Lower left, in the maker's hand: Osmunda regalis. British
- Held by
- The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
- Accession
- 84.XO.227.42 — leaf 42 of the album
- File
- The museum's own IIIF endpoint, at high resolution
- Crop
- [401, 124, 3882, 5323] in [x, y, width, height] → ratio 1.3712, taken where the blue plateau begins on all four sides
- Printed at
- 30 × 40 cm sheet: image 19.40 × 26.60 cm, original size, 1:1 — 508 dpi available
40 × 50 cm sheet: image 30.63 × 42.00 cm, 1.58× — 322 dpi available
Where this album came from
Anne Dixon gave the album to «H. D.» in 1853 — the cover is stamped A. D. to H. D. 1853, probably Henry Dixon. It passed by descent to a niece, Miss Wedderburn; was given to the Girls Friendly Society in Paris in 1932; went through Galerie Octant, Paris and Robert Hershkowitz Ltd.; and reached the Getty through Daniel Wolf in 1984. The royal fern is the largest British species, and this leaf shows why the format was chosen: the frond only just fits the page.
What we measured
Our crop gives a ratio of 1.3712 against the catalogued 1.3093. The catalogued image height stops just below the caption while the coated blue paper continues; we reproduce the sheet whole and anchor the scale on the catalogued width of 19.4 cm. The printed image is 19.40 × 26.60 cm. The album page edge shows on the left as a bright line and then a shadow trough before the blue begins; the crop starts where the blue does, so neither is in your print apart from the two slivers noted below.
Condition, measured
All four corners of this sheet are whole and nothing has broken away — worth stating, because the five Atkins algae sheets in this catalogue have lost corners and we print them as they are. The only traces of the album page are two slivers: 4.3 mm of the bottom edge at the left corner, 0.2 mm deep, and at most 0.3 mm along the last 14 mm of the right-hand edge, where the crop grazes the edge of the coated paper. Both stay, because taking them out would mean trimming the sheet inward.
Of the five fern plates this is the one whose plant runs furthest off its own paper. The frond crosses the left-hand edge twice — 3.6 mm wide at 8.5 cm from the top, 11.8 mm wide at 12.6 cm — and in both places it continues more than two centimetres into the sheet, which is as far as we measure. Two pinnae come within a few millimetres of the top edge without reaching it. That is the plant, not a crop decision: the frond was larger than the page, exactly as the note above about the format suggests.
Method, for the record: measured on the museum's file at 20.0 pixels to the millimetre, scanning every column of the top and bottom edges and every row of the left and right edges from the boundary inward to a depth of 20 mm, then seen with the eye — all four corners at about five times the printed size, each edge as a strip 10 mm deep, and the whole sheet. Audited 3 September 2026.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Made in 1853; both makers died in the nineteenth century. Public domain worldwide.
The photograph. The J. Paul Getty Museum publishes this digitisation under Open Content, with the rights statement «No Copyright». Taken from the museum's own endpoint.
What we do not claim. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. Not a cyanotype: a cyanotype is a contact print made in sunlight, and this is not one.
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