Sheet record — Hiroshige, Plum Garden at Kameido

This page belongs to the sheet in your tube. It is the record behind the print — the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and what to order if you want it framed by the weekend. None of it is needed to decide on a print, which is why it is here rather than on the product page.

The sheet you have

Work

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Plum Garden at Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki), from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1857

Object

Colour woodblock print (nishiki-e), ōban; ink and colour on paper, 34.9 × 23.9 cm

Held by

The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson

Accession

1965.1027 (AIC object 150278)

File

The museum's own IIIF endpoint, 6482 × 9240 px, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator

Crop

[250, 106, 6371, 9130] → 6121 × 9024 px, the printed block with the paper the printer left around it

Printed at

40 × 50 cm sheet: image 23.67 × 34.90 cm, original size, 1:1 — 657 dpi available
50 × 70 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 61.92 cm, 1.77× — 370 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.

Framing it — what to order

If you want a mat anyway

Then go one frame size up and let the mat replace our border rather than sit on it. Cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side, so no white gap shows at the edge:

40 × 50 sheet in a 50 × 70 frame

Window 23.1 × 34.3 cm. Mat margins come out at about 13.5 cm each side, 16.6 cm above and 19.1 cm below. Position the sheet so the image sits in the window, not so the sheet sits centred.

50 × 70 sheet in a 70 × 100 frame

Window 41.4 × 61.3 cm. Margins about 14.3 cm each side, 18.0 above, 20.7 below.

Mat board

Off-white or warm white rather than bright white — the paper is warm and a cold mat makes it look grey. Acid-free, 1.4 mm or thicker.

Buying in inches

The nearest US standards are 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) for the small sheet and 20 × 28 in (50.8 × 71.1 cm) for the large one. Both are a few millimetres larger than the sheet, so the print can drift inside the frame — hold it with archival corner pockets rather than tape, and it will stay put.

Whatever you do

Do not trim the sheet. The margin is part of the object we sold you, and a trimmed sheet cannot be re-matted later.

Please measure before you buy or cut. The figures on this page describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre, mats and frames vary between makers, and we cannot know which frame or framer you are using. Check these numbers against your own sheet and against your frame's rebate before ordering a mat or cutting one. We will replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong — we cannot replace a frame or a mat that turns out not to fit.

Which impression, and why this one

A woodblock print is not one object photographed several times. Every impression is a separate pull from the blocks, printed in a different year, kept in a different drawer, exposed to different light — and nearly all have faded unevenly, the reds first. So the choice of copy is a curatorial decision, and it is the decision that matters most on a sheet like this one.

We print the Art Institute's impression. On it the red-to-white gradation in the sky is cleanly printed and still saturated, and the green of the ground is still green; on most surviving sheets that green has turned to olive. The gradation is the reason to own this picture at all — it was wiped onto the block by hand, one sheet at a time, and it is the first thing a tired impression loses.

Vincent van Gogh copied this composition in oil in 1887. He was not quoting a masterpiece; it was a cheap print he had bought by the bundle. That is worth knowing when you look at the foreground trunk, which refuses to get out of the way — it is exactly what he was after.

What we measured

The edge of the printed block on this sheet is not a straight line. Measured natively, in ten bands down the height, its left edge runs from about x 164 at the top of the sheet to about x 228 at the bottom — roughly two millimetres of wander, because the paper was trimmed by hand and has cockled in the years since. A rectangular crop therefore cannot be more exact than about a millimetre, and ours is placed on the edge of the printed ground rather than inside it.

Record of a correction: on 2 September 2026 an edge audit reported that this crop carried 2.6 mm of blank paper on the left. Re-measured and checked by eye at five-fold magnification, that reading proved to be an artifact — the routine had treated the pale printed ground at the left of the composition as unprinted paper. A corrective crop was printed for a few hours and cut about 2.5 mm off the printed ground; it was reverted the same day, and the original crop above is the one in production. If your sheet was made in that window and its left edge sits tighter than the record above, write to us and we will replace it.

What we are allowed to sell

The work. Hiroshige died in 1858, so the Swiss, EU and UK threshold of seventy years after the maker's death was met long ago; the sheet was published in 1857, so the United States threshold of publication before 1930 is met too. Public domain in every market we ship to.

The photograph. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes images of public-domain works under Creative Commons Zero. In its own wording, users are free to use these images for any purpose, commercial and noncommercial; a caption naming artist, title, date and the museum is requested, not required — and it is on the product page. A faithful reproduction of a flat public-domain work creates no new right.

What we do not claim. This is a giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one. A woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums — this one is in Chicago.

Living with it

Pigment inks on acid-free paper are rated for over a hundred years indoors without significant fading. What shortens that is direct sunlight and damp, not time. Hang it out of the sun's path, keep it off an outside wall in an unheated room, and it will outlast the frame.

Let a rolled sheet rest flat under a couple of books for a day or two before framing. It will lie down on its own; it does not need to be pressed.

Glass: anything will do indoors away from direct sun. UV glazing buys margin in a bright room; it is not needed in an ordinary one.

The five criteria this sheet passed

Documented origin, from a named collection with an explicit public-domain release. Free in every market we ship to, on both dates. Resolution that carries the size, natively. It holds at two metres. And there is something to say about it — which is what this page has been.

Questions about this record: info@museartis.com. Every figure above can be checked; the museum publishes the same file we worked from.