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
- Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifū kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830–33
- Object
- Colour woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and colour on paper, ōban yoko-e, 25.7 × 37.7 cm. Publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi
- Held by
- Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Louis W. Hill, Jr.
- Accession
- P.70.148 (Mia object 7505)
- File
- The museum's own image host, 9396 × 6503 px, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- [77, 60, 9342, 6424] → 9266 × 6365 px, the outermost ink of the printed block
- Printed at
- 50 × 40 cm sheet: image 37.70 × 25.90 cm, 1:1 — 624 dpi available
70 × 50 cm sheet: image 58.80 × 40.39 cm, 1.56× — 400 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 this impression and not another
No other Hokusai varies as much from copy to copy. The red block was printed with a fugitive pigment and in most surviving sheets it has drifted towards orange and brown; the green at the tree line is a yellow laid over blue, and the yellow goes first, leaving flat blue behind. Two sheets of the same design, printed in the same year from the same blocks, can look like different pictures a century later. So we compared eight impressions in four collections before choosing.
Each file was rendered at the same size and the same measurements taken: the mean hue and saturation of the red field, and how much of the picture still reads as green at the foot of the mountain.
- Minneapolis P.70.148
- 9396 × 6503 px · red hue 19.5° · red saturation 0.546 · green 0.118 · sheet 25.7 × 37.7 cm
- Chicago 1952.341
- 9649 × 6514 px · red hue 15.8° · red saturation 0.457 · green 0.008 · sheet trimmed to 24.2 × 36.5 cm
- New York JP2568
- 3979 × 2743 px · red hue 16.0° · red saturation 0.486 · green 0.053
- Chicago 1925.3243
- 4817 × 3307 px · red hue 24.4° · red saturation 0.447 · green 0.007
- Amsterdam RP-P-1952-183
- 6184 × 4504 px · red hue 26.9° · red saturation 0.403 · green 0.000
- Three others
- New York JP2960 and JP9 and Chicago 1928.1085 carry between 197 and 276 dpi at true size — under our floor before colour is even discussed. The Chicago sheet has additionally toned to yellow-green.
Resolution narrowed it to two. The Amsterdam sheet holds 418 dpi at true size but only 267 on the large sheet, so it cannot carry the pair. That left Chicago 1952.341 and Minneapolis P.70.148.
State decided between them. Chicago's file is 2.7 % wider and its red is a shade truer in hue, but the red is a fifth less saturated, the green at the tree line has gone, and the sheet itself was trimmed down to 24.2 × 36.5 cm — a centimetre and a half under the ōban format. The Minneapolis sheet is untrimmed at the standard size, has the strongest red of the eight, and is the only large file in which the green still reads as green. That is the one we print.
The companion sheet in this shop, the Great Wave, comes from the Art Institute of Chicago. Leaving Chicago for this one was a deliberate departure, made on the sheet and not on the institution.
What we did not do
Nothing to the colour. No re-reddening of a red that has already lived two centuries, no retouching, no correction. The museum's file is printed as it is, and what you get is a photograph of one particular piece of paper from the 1830s, not an idea of what the design once looked like.
What we measured
The sheet was trimmed to the printed block before the museum ever acquired it, so the surround in the file is the photographer's near-white ground. A pixel counts as ink where saturation reaches 0.12 or the value falls below 0.82, and an edge is set where eight consecutive ink pixels begin. Some 4,600 columns and 3,160 rows were read as a distribution rather than as an average, because a hand-pulled print registered by eye does not have straight edges: the block wanders by two to four millimetres. We take the outer envelope, so no part of the block is cut. One speck about ten pixels across, forty-four pixels below the true bottom edge, is dirt on the paper and was left out; it is the only exclusion.
The anchor is the longer side: 37.7 cm across 9266 pixels is 245.8 pixels per centimetre, or 624 dpi at true size. Measured on the height the same file gives 247.6 — 0.73 % away, which on a hand-trimmed sheet is what the trimming costs.
What we are allowed to sell
Hokusai died in 1849, so the work has been out of copyright in Switzerland, the EU and the UK since 1920, and it was published around 1830, far before the 1930 line that governs the United States. There is no estate and no restored term. The Minneapolis Institute of Art marks the object Public Domain and states that such works may be copied, modified, distributed and performed, including for commercial purposes, without asking permission. The original is a flat sheet, so no new right arises in the photograph in any of our markets in any case. We name the museum as the source and never as a partner.
A note on colour
The sheet is not tagged blue in this shop. Measured by the house method — a 240-pixel rendition, saturation floor 0.06 — the blue band holds 0.470 of the coloured area against a threshold of 0.60; at a floor of 0.15 it reaches 0.540, closer but still short. The sky is large, but the red cone takes a third of the picture and the cloud band is unsaturated white.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 6.15 cm each side, 6.56 above, 7.54 below.
- 70 × 50 cm sheet
- A 70 × 50 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 20 in. Margins 5.60 cm each side, 4.47 above, 5.14 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 37.10 × 25.30 cm for the small sheet, 58.20 × 39.79 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